High Adventure

1 Jade Nor Gold

It was nice to see Belize City again. Driving in Haulover Road in the battered pickup truck, entering town through the white, bright, flower-strewn cemetery, seeing the little pirate port sagging out ahead of him as ramshackle and unworkable and permanent as ever, Kirby smiled and felt himself relax; it was good to be home.

Time is the great healer. Today was Tuesday, the 21st of February (temperature 82 degrees, sky azure, humidity 90 percent, sun blinding). It was just 11 days since Black Friday, that awful day when Valerie Greene had blown his beautiful temple scam; when Whitman Lemuel had panicked and run back to Duluth with his tail between his legs; when Kirby had reluctantly, angrily, but necessarily told the troops to dismantle the temple, while he himself took what might very well be the final shipment of fresh-made antiquities north to market. A furious, weary, and pessimistic Kirby had made that flight, but the Kirby driving into Belize City today, Manny gap-toothed and grinning beside him, was a changed man: happy, content, and hopeful.

What had happened in those 11 days to change him so thoroughly? Very little. In fact, like Conan Doyle’s unbarking dog in the night, it was what hadn’t happened that had most encouraged him.

After the marijuana-and-artifact flight of the weekend before last, Kirby had told himself he should take on a lot more cargo jobs, since the temple business was probably dead, but he just hadn’t had the strength of will. For four days, back in his little nest among the Cruzes, he had simply sat and felt sorry for himself and watched videotapes: Errol Flynn in “Captain Blood,” Burt Lancaster in “The Crimson Pirate,” Clark Gable in “China Seas.” He had eaten Estelle’s food, drunk a moderate amount of Belikin beer, played card games and pebble games with Manny, and made no plans. Cynthia sat alone and unwanted in the shade of her hangar of trees. Messages were neither sent nor delivered. Hope did not put in an appearance.

But then Tommy Watson did, last Friday afternoon. The only one of his Indian co-conspirators from South Abilene who had ever visited Kirby at home, Tommy came sauntering up the path out of the jungle, next to the tomato patch, strolled over to where Kirby was hunkered in the dirt playing aggies with two of the kids, and said, “How, Kimosabe?”

“Fried.” That was Kirby’s joke.

“We don’t see you around the old joint very much any more.”

“There is no old joint any more,” Kirby said. “Hush a second.” With a greenie nestled in the crook of the first knuckle of the first finger of his right hand, thumb cocked and ready, he took careful aim across a clear patch of packed tan dirt at a beautiful steelie, paused, squinted one eye shut, fired with absolute precision, and missed by a mile.

As the kids crowed and hollered, Kirby sighed, shook his head, and got to his feet, brushing off his knees. “You distracted me,” he accused Tommy, and told the kids, “I’ll get even with you guys later.”

Their jeers echoed around the clearing. Dignified, Kirby turned away and strolled toward the house, Tommy at his side. “What’s happening on my land?” he asked, as though it were a casual question.

“Nothing.”

“Excitement all over?” That would be a good thing; the sooner ended, the sooner forgotten.

“No excitement at all,” Tommy said. “Nobody come out except that turkey sold you the place.”

“Innocent?”

“There’s a Mom and Dad couldn’t read the future.”

“Innocent came out? Nobody else? No cops?”

“No. And no firemen, no farmers, no cooks, no sailors, no truckdrivers and no high school girls. In other words, nobody.”

“All right, Tommy,” Kirby said. “Don’t get your back up.”

“I’m happy,” Tommy said, as Kirby opened the front door and led the way inside. The Betamax stood with its mouth open, ready to entertain. “I’m not hibernating,” Tommy said, following him in, shutting the door. “I’m out and about.”

“All right, all right.” Kirby shut the Betamax’s mouth, as a hint to Tommy. “Sit down,” he said. “You want a beer? You want to tell me about it?”

“Sure, sure, sure.”

So they sat, and had a beer together, and Tommy described the inaction out at the former temple. After a whole night and morning of back-breaking labor — Tommy made quite a point of that part of it — untempling the hill, absolutely nobody showed up for the closing. All day Saturday the Indians waited, using all their age-old lore to watch from cunning concealment as no police Land Rovers came across the plain, no vans of reporters and photographers, no truckloads of archaeologists. No reconnaissance planes circled low for aerial photography. Nothing at all, in fact, had occurred. “It was very boring,” Tommy said.

“Sometimes it’s better to be bored. Then what happened?” “More of the same.”

Sunday had been a repeat of Saturday. By midafternoon they weren’t even bothering to keep watch anymore, but merely walked around the hill every once in a while to see if there were any activity, of which there continued to be none.

“They were holding off,” Kirby suggested. “Watching from afar, hoping to catch the perpetrators in the act, or on the site, or something.”

“We figured it could be that,” Tommy said, “so we laid low. Luz went to the mission Sunday afternoon, see was there any news, any gossip, but no. I myself went out almost all the way to Privassion, but there wasn’t a thing, man. No vehicles, no stakeouts, nothing.”

“That woman was on her way to the law,” Kirby said. “Valerie Greene. There’s no question in my mind.”

“Well, maybe there was questions in their minds, because we still don’t have any law.” Tommy drained his bottle. “You got another?”

“Tell me about Innocent.”

“I’m too dry.”

Kirby got them a pair of beers, and Tommy said, “That was Monday afternoon. He come out with this other fella, skinny nervous tan fella.”

“He’s got an assistant like that in Belmopan,” Kirby said. “Young guy.”

“That’s the one. They come out in a nice new pickup, said on the doors it was from the Highways Department.”

“And what did they do?”

“Walked,” Tommy said, and swigged beer at the memory of what a hot and tiring sight that had been. “They walked all over the hill. Your pal—”

“Call him Innocent, not my pal.”

“He isn’t my pal,” Tommy pointed out, “and if I call him Innocent I’ll have to confess it in church.”

“What did he do, Tommy?”

“Marched around. Kicked the ground a lot. Stomped. Looked mad, confused, worried, upset, pissed off. The young guy with him looked scared.”

“Scared?”

“It was like a man out with his dog,” Tommy said, grinning a bit. “Your pal stomped up and down the hill, while the little guy scurried this way and that, looking behind bushes, over the edges of drop-offs, up and down and back and forth like he’s chasing a rabbit.”

“Then what did they do?”

“Left,” Tommy said simply.

“Come on, Tommy,” Kirby said, trying to look and sound dangerous. “Tell me what happened.”

“I am telling you. They walked up and down the hill. They stood on the top a while, your pal scratching his head and the other guy making little dashes back and forth, looking under pebbles. We watched them, but we stayed out of sight, and you can’t see South Abilene from up there, so there was never any conversation, And after a while they went back down the hill again, your pal pounding his feet down like he was mad at the ground, the other guy rushing back and forth, smelling the earth. Then they got. back into their Highways Department pickup and left. Your pal was driving.”

“That was Monday?”

“And today is Friday, according to the mission,” Tommy said, “and that’s the last visitor we had.”

“I don’t get it,” Kirby said.

“It’s beginning to look,” Tommy said, “as though the coast is maybe clear.”

It was beginning to look that way to Kirby, too. Had Valerie Greene simply been too wild-eyed and weird, and had her story therefore been ignored by the authorities? Anybody who knew that parcel of land at all well, of course, would disbelieve Valerie Greene from the outset.

Which raised the problem and question of Innocent. Why, at that time of all times, had Innocent and his office assistant decided to come visit his old land? What had he been looking for? He, of all people, had to know there was no Mayan temple there, that Lava Sxir Yt did not exist and had never existed. So what was he after? What garbled story had reached Innocent’s ears that had led him to believe there might be something of interest on Kirby’s land?

And who had told him the garbled story, whatever it was? Over the weekend, Kirby brooded on those questions, on the absence of official response to Valerie Greene’s undoubted report, on the bewildering visit of Innocent St. Michael, and finally he came up with a scenario which seemed to him to fit all the facts:

Valerie Greene, as Kirby well knew, was an hysteric, particularly on the subject of purloined antiquities. Let’s just say she went to town, she made a report to the police at the top of her lungs, yelling and hollering and demanding immediate action and send in the troops. What would the police do? They would not want to be around such a crazy person, but just on the off chance she was right they would not want to throw her out of the office either, so they would pass her on to some other authority, who would pass her on to somebody else, and so on and so on, until at last someone would recognize the land in question as having once belonged to Innocent St. Michael. A quick phone call to Innocent in Belmopan would produce his guarantee that no Mayan temple could possibly be found out there, and various maps and surveys would support his statement.

In the meantime, of course, Valerie Greene would also have been hollering about Whitman Lemuel, as being part of the scheme. Let’s say somebody went to question Lemuel before he boarded his plane. That was exactly the sort of situation Lemuel would know how to deal with; stand on his dignity, show his credentials, denounce Valerie Greene as a dangerous lunatic with delusional ideas. With a member of government (Innocent) assuring everyone the woman’s story was impossible, and a distinguished North American scholar (Lemuel) assuring the same everyone that she was crazy, and with Valerie Greene herself ranting and raving in office after office...

Yes. It could have worked that way. It was a very probable scenario. The absence of any official response at all, not even a quick casual investigation, supported the idea. And if someone had checked with Innocent, it would explain his driving out there to find out what if anything was going on. Trust Innocent to leave no stone unturned.

This scenario fit the facts as no other did, so by yesterday Kirby had become convinced of its truth. Valerie Greene had done her worst, and had not been believed. Innocent’s curiosity had been aroused, but had not been satisfied. Whatever tempest in a teapot might have occurred in Belmopan or Belize City, it was over now. Lava Sxir Yt could rise again!

There was no reason to even slow down. Tommy and his fellow workers had been busily creating carvings etched in stone, bone utensils, broken terracotta pots with one triangular piece missing. Kirby for his part had two sets of customers, Mr. Mortmain’s friend Bobbi and the team of Witcher and Feldspan, who had already seen the temple. It was time to start rolling again by selling Witcher and Feldspan some pre-Columbian artifacts.

Sorry; no jade, no gold. Must have been a temple in a poor neighborhood.

So yesterday Kirby had finally come out of his funk and become decisive again. Last night he’d gone up to Orange Walk and talked to some people, and had come back with a job flying a cargo to Florida this coming Saturday. And this morning Estelle had given Manny a shopping list, and off he and Kirby had gone, jouncing in the pickup the other way to Belize City, where Kirby dropped Manny off by Swing Bridge and went on Cable & Wireless, where he sent Witcher and Feldspan the good news: See you Sunday, with our first shipment.

Coming out of Cable & Wireless, Kirby ran into the devil himself; that is, Innocent. “Well, well,” Innocent said, spying him, “my old friend Kirby. You haven’t been around, man.” There was more than the usual edge in his voice.

They shook hands in the usual way, though, gripping as hard as they knew how while smiling in one another’s faces, but it seemed to Kirby somehow that Innocent’s heart wasn’t in it. The smile on Innocent’s face seemed false, the strength of his grip a fraction off. In that first instant, it seemed to Kirby that Innocent was somehow doing an Innocent imitation.

They released one another. “I’ve been resting,” Kirby told him.

“Heavy labors?”

“Man must work,” Kirby said. “How about you, Innocent? You up to anything these days?”

“Not much, Kirby.” There was something grumpy about Innocent, underneath the imitation smile. “Too many schemers around, man,” he said, smiling hard at Kirby. “Too many schemes. Too much competition.”

Kirby grinned. “Maybe,” he said, “maybe, Innocent, you ought to retire.”

That put the steel in Innocent’s backbone. Rearing up, eyes sparking, Innocent said, “When I retire, Kirby, you’ll be the first to know. And when I don’t retire, you’ll be the first to know that, too.”

2 The End of the World

What a nerve that man has got, Innocent angrily thought, as he watched Kirby swagger away down the street amid the pedestrians and the bicycles and the rump-sprung big American cars and the dusty pickup trucks and the dope dealers’ shiny-bodied black-windowed Broncos. To do what he has done, Innocent bitterly thought, and show his face in this town again.

Valerie Greene. A vision of her fine white rump grasped between his two hands came unbidden into his mind, and he sighed. Her guileless big eyes and happy wide smile shone on him like a memory of the sun in the rainy season down south. But this rainy season would never end; the sun was gone for good. There was hardly any doubt in Innocent’s mind any longer that Valerie Greene was dead, and just as little doubt that Kirby Galway had done it.

He himself was also guilty, of course, if only in a small way. He had trusted that poor girl to a very bad man. He had trusted her to him because he was a very bad man, but a very bad man whom Innocent believed he could control. And now see what had happened.

Valerie had never returned to her room at the hotel. The Land Rover had never been brought back to its garage. The driver had never showed up at his home in Teakettle.

The Fort George, seven days ago, had packed up Valerie Greene’s luggage and stored it away. The day before that, the Transportation Section had reported the Land Rover stolen. Over the last 11 days, Innocent had left messages for the skinny black man at all his usual haunts, and some unusual haunts as well, but no answer had as yet been received. Nor had the stolen Land Rover been found. Nor was there the slightest trace of Valerie Greene, alive or dead.

On Monday, thinking the land might tell him something about Valerie’s disappearance, or about whatever the hell Kirby’s scheme was, Innocent had driven out there, looking fruitlessly all the way for signs that the Land Rover had been in an accident. He’d brought Vernon along, to be a second person in case a witness was needed, or if there was trouble, and that was when he first became aware that Vernon was apparently in the middle of a nervous breakdown.

Another unnecessary complication. Vernon was too conscientious, that was the whole trouble, in a nation where the lackadaisical was the norm. Innocent told him so, on the drive out: “You work too hard, Vernon,” he said. “You don’t have to prove to me how valuable you are, I already know it. I know you’re trustworthy, and I guarantee you’ll be sitting in my chair some day. You’ve got a bright future, Vernon, you’ve worked hard for it and you deserve it. A man’s reputation is everything, and yours is grade A. If you just don’t overwork and make yourself sick, man, you’ve got it made.”

You’d think all that would have perked Vernon up a little, but no, just the reverse. The more Innocent tried to make him feel better, the more jumpy and unhappy and pessimistic Vernon became.

Out at the land, it was even worse. Innocent hadn’t told Vernon much about what they were doing there, so the young man could have had no idea what he was looking for, but he spent the whole time running up and down that hill, looking here, looking there, frantic and urgent and searching like a man who just lost the winning lottery ticket.

As for the land, it had been exactly the same, of course, which made Innocent mad at himself. What had he expected out there, an entire Mayan temple, one he’d failed somehow to notice all the years he’d owned this parcel?

But if there was no Mayan temple here — and there was no Mayan temple here — then what the hell was everybody so excited about? What had that expert Lemuel thought he was looking at? What was that conversation recorded by Witcher and Feldspan all about? And what had Valerie seen, when she’d come here?

Valerie. Poor sweet Valerie. Poor sweet dead Valerie. Though Innocent tried to continue to hope against hope, by now, 11 days after she and her driver and her vehicle had all disappeared, what other possibility was there?

All right, it wasn’t the end of the world. Well, it was the end of her world, obviously, but it wasn’t the end of Innocent’s. It was time to get back to his own concerns. And if, in dealing with his own concerns, it so happened he could poke a sharp stick into the eye of Valerie’s probable murderer, so much the better.

Meaning Kirby Galway.

It all fit. According to Lemuel’s story, there had been a minute or two when Kirby had been with the people at the Land Rover before Lemuel joined them; he could have paid the driver then to do the job. Or, after unloading Lemuel in Belize City — by air, remember, by air— Kirby could have flown back and intercepted the Land Rover still on the way.

Which was, of course, why Kirby had been so thoroughly out of sight the last 10 days. Naturally afraid his plot would fall through, or be exposed, he’d lain low until he was sure there was no more danger. And now here he was again, walking the streets of Belize City as big as you please, cocky and smiling, going so far as to taunt Innocent that he should retire! Retire!

Surly, unhappy, unwilling to admit that his confidence in himself had been shaken, Innocent glowered after the departing Kirby. “Retire,” he muttered. “I’ll show you a thing or two about retiring.”

His real estate office was over on Regent Street. Walking there, feeling unusually heavy, oddly stiff in his joints, he went in to find a telephone message from Vernon in Belmopan. “Hmmm,” he said, and went back to his office, switched on the overhead light and the ceiling fan, sat down at his mahogany desk, and phoned.

“Oh, Mister St. Michael,” Vernon said, sounding terrible, worse than ever, “the police called.”

Innocent’s eyes widened. He sat upright, hand squeezing the phone. Which of his many many plots and scams had come unglued? “Yes?”

“They have found that Land Rover,” Vernon said. The man sounded as though he were actually weeping. “You know the one I mean, the one we—”

“I know the one! They found it?”

“In pieces.”

“An accident?” Innocent was flabbergasted.

“No no,” Vernon whimpered. “Taken apart. Somebody took it apart all last week, down by Punta Gorda. They sold the parts down there, to different people. The police got onto it Saturday night when there was an accident, and the radiator—”

“Yes, yes, never mind police procedure. Do they have the man?”

“No, sir. They think they got about a quarter of the parts now, they want to know should they go on looking.”

“What do I care?” Innocent yelled, raging. “Am I their nanny?” He slammed the phone down on Vernon’s mewling, and sat glaring at the maps of nation and city decorating the opposite wall.

Punta Gorda. The city at the very southern end of Belize, where eastern and western national borders fold toward one another, meeting at the Bay of Honduras. From Punta Gorda it is no distance at all to the border. From the border it is 30 miles across Guatemala to Honduras. And from there lies the entire world.

The driver was gone. He fled in the Land Rover, disassembled it and sold the parts in Punta Gorda to finance his flight, then left the country. He would never return.

The last dim hope was gone. Valerie Greene was dead.

3 Cynthia Takes It Off

Cynthia stood on her left wingtip and looked down through the warm air to the top of Kirby’s barren hill. Then Kirby slid her out of the roll, eased down the far flank of the hill, and pushed the knotted face towel out the small side-flap window as he approached South Abilene. Dancing children came scampering up out of the huts, chasing the towel as it tumbled down through the sky. They would bring it to Tommy, who would already know the message inside, but who would carefully undo the knots anyway, open the towel, find the little plastic film canister, pop the top off that, and read the scrawled note on the tom-off piece of manila envelope: “Bring out the goods.”

Feeling fine, Kirby flew around a little more, watching the clot of children find the towel, fight over it briefly, then race it back en masse to town. Twice he buzzed the huts, not too low, just for the hell of it, but when he saw the Indians start to file out of the village and up the hill, each one carrying a sack or bag or parcel, he angled away, flying high and higher into the pale blue, then dive-bombing his damn property, pulling out of the dive low enough to cause dust-devils on the hill’s eastern flank, then landing on the cracked dry plain, creating great billows of tan dust in his wake. He turned Cynthia and she trundled over as close as possible to the base of the hill, her wings jiggling gently over the uneven ground.

The dust had all settled and Kirby was hunkered in the shade of Cynthia’s left wing, scratching a picture of a horse in the dry dirt (it looked like a dog, or maybe a frog), when Tommy and the villagers arrived. “Well,” Tommy said, “you’re feeling pretty good about yourself, huh?”

“Pretty good,” Kirby admitted. “We’re back in business.”

“You mean we get to put the temple back up?”

“Sure. I’ll be around Belize City this week, maybe go out to San Pedro, find a live one, or go up to the States for a while. We’re full time in business again.”

Luz said, “You bring any gage?”

“Not this time. You don’t want too much of that anyway, Luz, it’ll rob you of ambition.”

Tommy turned to look at Luz, squinting, trying to visualize him robbed of ambition.

Kirby had opened the cargo door at the left rear and the passenger door behind the copilot’s seat on the right, and the villagers methodically stowed all the packages they were carrying, then each one stolidly headed back to South Abilene. Mostly they didn’t look at Kirby at all, but if he did catch somebody’s eye that person would give him a shy smile and a nod and that was all. Tommy and Luz were the link between Kirby and the Indians, and nobody ever tried to bridge the gulf.

Kirby wasn’t even sure, in fact, why the Indians went along with this scam. They liked the money, obviously — most of it went into colorful clothes and sweet processed foods from town — but he had the impression they could get along just as well without it. It seemed sometimes as though they did it for its own sake, that they found it fun to recreate their ancestors’ art and artifacts. The shyness linked up with that idea, the modest appreciation of his appreciation of their skills.

Watching as Cynthia was loaded, Kirby said, “I hope you gave me a lot of Zotzes.”

“Well,” Tommy said reluctantly, “actually, no.”

“Not a lot? How many?”

“Well,” Tommy said, “actually, none.”

Kirby gave him an exasperated look. “Come on, Tommy, you know how they love Zotz in the States.”

“Maybe so,” Tommy said, “but down here old Zotzilaha is bad news. People don’t like to make him.”

Luz said, “These are very primitive assholes here, you know. They do Zotz, they figure Zotz maybe gonna get them.”

Kirby understood the problem, but it was still a real annoyance. Zotzilaha Chimalman, the bat-god of the ancient Maya, was the most fearsome of the Mayan demons, a grinning evil creature who lived in a gruesome cave surrounded by bats. One of his tasks was to divert the souls of the recently dead from the path leading to Mayan paradise and send them instead to the eternal darkness of hell. In “Popol Vuh,” the great Mayan creation myth, Zotzilaha appears as Camazotz, the enemy of man. After less than 400 years of Christianity, the Indians still found their ancient gods potent, and none more so than Zotzilaha Chimalman, the powerful personification of evil, the bat-god who flies, who owns the night and who destroys human beings out of sheer joy in his own viciousness.

It was easy to understand why the villagers didn’t like creating images of Zotzilaha, but the problem was that naturally the great demon-god was extremely popular among Kirby’s customers. Give a sophisticate a devil to play with any day; heros are boring.

“Tommy,” Kirby said, “I really need some Zotzes.”

“I’ll talk to my troops,” Tommy promised.

“Why don’t you do some yourself?”

Tommy looked vague, his eyes wandering away as he shrugged and said, “I’ve been busy.”

“Jesus, Tommy. You, too?”

“You’ll get your Zotzes,” Tommy said defensively. “Okay?”

“Okay.”

Not wanting a fight with Tommy, Kirby made a point of going over to the plane to watch how the loading was coming along. Luz’s sister Rosita came over to Kirby and said, “You ain’t been around.”

“Been busy, been busy.”

“How’s your wife?” There was some sort of edge in Rosita’s voice, some sort of glint in her eye.

Kirby pretended not to notice. “Worse,” he said. “She keeps seeing spiders on the wall.”

“Maybe there is spiders on the wall. Most walls got spiders on them.”

“Not these walls,” Kirby assured her. “It’s a very clean hospital, completely clean.”

Rosita nodded, scuffing her filthy toe in the dirt. By daylight she was, paradoxically, less attractive and more interesting. The wild girl tends not to be too interested in personal grooming. “Sheena says—” she said.

“Who?”

“Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.”

Oh; a comic book. “Sorry,” Kirby said. “What does she say?”

“She says she figures you don’t got a wife at all.”

Kirby stared. “She what?”

“She says she figures you’re some kinda con artist,” Rosita said. “Well, that’s what you are, huh?”

“Not with you, Rosita.”

“Huh.” The glint in Rosita’s eye was on the increase. “What Sheena says, she says you just don’t wanna get married, or maybe you just don’t wanna marry me, so you make up this wife in the crazy hospital, you can’t get a divorce unless she gets sane again.”

“That’s what Sheena says, is it?” Kirby was beginning to get a little irritated.

“Yeah. That’s what she says.”

“You talk to Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, and she talks back to you.”

“Sure.”

“Well, you tell Sheena,” Kirby started.

“Tell her yourself. She’s over in the village.”

What Kirby might have said next he would never know, because Tommy and Luz came over then and Tommy said, “Come on back to the fort, Kimosabe, let’s party.”

“Can’t today,” Kirby said. “I’ve been letting things slide. I’ve got to get moving again.” The truth was, he was too impatient right now for partying. A week and a half sitting around was more than enough.

Luz said, “We got a surprise for you.”

Rosita said, “I already told him about it.”

They all frowned at her, Kirby in bewilderment, the others in exasperation. “Asshole,” her brother Luz commented, and Tommy said, “What did you do that for?”

“I don’t owe him no favors,” Rosita said, and went away with a straight back and a little whip-switch movement of the behind.

They all watched her go. Tommy said, “Kirby, I got the feeling your wife just died.”

“Somebody put some ideas in that child’s head,” Kirby said. Maybe somebody at the mission, he was thinking. He was very bitter. “I really better not come back to town this time.”

Tommy and Luz agreed. Cynthia was loaded by now, so Kirby climbed aboard, waved, and waited till the Indians were partway up the hill on their way home before he started the engine, not wanting to strangle them in dust. Then he turned his trusty steed aside, got up to a gallop, and became once again airborne.

He wasn’t happy with the way he’d left things; turning down their party invitation, getting static from Rosita and not dealing with it very well. Circling around in the sky like a lazy wasp, he decided to go over and buzz them once more, waggle his wings, let them know everything was still basically okay.

The line of Indians, single file, had crested the hill and started down the other side. Kirby flew east, then came back low, right down on the deck as he crossed the dry plain, leathery snakes ducking their heads, the hill looming up ahead. He ran up the hill, Cynthia’s wheels just yards above the scrub, and burst with a roar over the top, suddenly visible and extremely audible to the people on the other side.

The Indians loved it. They fell around laughing, holding their sides, pointing at Cynthia as she circled, waggling her wings. Even the plane seemed to grin.

Kirby rolled over them once more, then headed down and around for South Abilene to give the shut-ins a treat. The cluster of huts came into view and a figure ducked into one of them, out of sight, as Kirby flew over. He gave them some throttle, stood Cynthia on her tail over the village, and heard some of the cargo shift around. Deciding to quit endangering the merchandise, he leveled out and turned north-northeast, toward the Cruzes and home.

Nice day. Nice lot of artifacts aboard to sell to Bobbi and to Witcher and Feldspan. Nice to be in motion again.

A memory tugged at him as he flew along, the many dark greens below, the pale blue high above. The memory of that figure who had run away into one of the huts as he’d come over town. In his memory that figure was awfully pale. And had his eyes deceived him, or had the figure been female?

Sheena?

Queen of the Jungle?

4 Father Sullivan Drives By

Valerie stuck her head out the hut door and watched the nasty little plane buzz away at last. “Him again!” she said.

The tribespeople were coming back into the village, all laughing and talking and slapping one another’s shoulders. They’d loved being endangered by that airplane, Valerie could tell. Only Rosita looked less than delighted by it all. Could it be...

Valerie went over to Rosita, and pointed toward the now-gone plane. “Him?” she asked. “Is he the man you told me about?”

“You bet,” Rosita said grimly. “And I just give it to him straight, what you said to me, and he got pretty shifty. I bet you right all along.”

“I know I’m right! That man?”

Rosita looked alert. “You know Kirby?”

“Kirby Galway, that’s right, that’s his name!”

“You know him, Sheena?”

Valerie had long since given up trying to get the tribespeople to quit calling her Sheena and call her Valerie. Even though her hair wasn’t blonde, and even though her remaining rags of clothing bore no resemblance at all to a tiger skin, and even though she had never swung from vines in her entire life, nevertheless when she had stumbled into this village a week ago the man called Tommy Watson had at once dubbed her Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. And so had everyone else, deeply amused, once he’d explained that comic book character to them. In fact, it was during his description of the comic book Sheena, in Valerie’s presence, with some of the comparative details becoming rather personal, that Valerie had let them all know she understood Kekchi and wished they wouldn’t talk about her in quite that manner.

“She speaks our language!” Tommy had cried, in delight and wonder. “She is Sheena!”

In fact, the variant of Kekchi spoken in this village was not at all the same as the pure language she had so doggedly learned, but at least it was similar enough so she could understand most of what was said to her, unless the person spoke very fast.

And as to their calling her Sheena, after three days and nights of wandering through forest and jungle and swamp and desert Valerie would have agreed to any condition in return for a full meal and a safe bed. That the only condition imposed was that she answer to the name of Sheena was odd, but not difficult. Sheena she became, Sheena she had been for a week, and Sheena she would go on being for...

... who knew how long?

She didn’t dare go back to civilization, at least not yet. Who knew how many more of them were in that rotten racket together? Kirby Galway; the driver who had locked Valerie in that filthy hut; the man Vernon who had come to give the driver his orders. And of course Innocent St. Michael must be the ringleader, the brains behind the whole scheme.

She had been foolish to let Vernon know she recognized him, because that was what had tipped the balance at last and made them decide they had to commit murder. Even though that nasty dark room had been very hot and humid, a chill had gone through her when she’d heard the driver say, “Say it out, Vernon. Say what you want,” and Vernon answer, “She has to die.”

After Vernon left, Valerie stood quaking in the darkness of the inner room, wondering if she had the strength to fight off the driver, knowing she did not. It was so dark in here she couldn’t see if there might be a stick or something lying around that might help.

Was there anything in the structure itself that might become a weapon? Valerie made her way to the rear wall and, partly by sight, partly by touch, made out that the slabs were nailed to vertical two- by Tours, a foot and a half apart, with here and there a horizontal two- by-four for extra support. Perhaps one of those horizontal pieces could be worked loose? She tried one, just at eye level, pried it a bit, pushed on it, and the two-by-four with the whole slab behind it, six feet long, simply fell off the building, with a clatter that made Valerie go rigid. Her head turned to stare at the closed door, but nothing happened, so the driver hadn’t heard or was possibly out somewhere.

Digging a grave.

It was then just a matter of moments for Valerie to force an opening large enough to eel through, ripping her left sleeve on a nail stuck out of the boards. The sky ahead was completely black, with visible stars. Above, it modulated through bruised-looking blues and sullen reds to become orange on the far side of the shack. So east must be straight ahead, which meant that north — and Belize City — were to her left. Miles and miles and miles away to her left.

Valerie struck off northward, moving as quickly as possible in the uncertain light over the uncertain ground. A half moon shone with increasing brilliance off to her right — giving her a guide to move north by — but its light wasn’t really much use.

Half an hour from the shack, Valerie all at once came upon the Land Rover. Her feet, seeking out the path of least resistance, had all unknowing found and stuck with the trail she and the driver had taken up from where the little dirt road had ended. And here she was back again, the Land Rover looking more nautical than ever in the watery moonlight.

Had he left the keys? Certainly not. Frustrated, unhappy, wishing she hadn’t had a useless brother like Robert Edward Greene V but a real brother who would have taught her how to jump ignitions, Valerie sat in the driver’s seat, resting from her exertions and trying to think what she could possibly do next. All at once she heard a racket headed this way, a crashing and muttering as of some ogre in a fairy tale, lumbering through the woods and telling himself about the children he would eat.

The driver!

Valerie hopped out and hurried away into the darkness, tripping over roots and rocks, falling once, skinning her knee, and deciding at last to wait right here and not injure herself any more out of panic.

She lay in deep darkness, amid shrubbery and low twisted trees. The Land Rover sat in a moonlit open space. Valerie was close enough to hear what the driver said as he too entered that moonlit space and paused to search himself with quick anger for the keys, and what he said was:

“Oh, no, not me, not Fred C! You don’t put Fred C. in one of those jails, oh, no, no you don’t. She’s gone, she’s gone, she gonna raise the alarm, everybody can go to jail but not Fred C., no, sir. Fred C. is gone! Down to Punta Gorda, sell this damn vehicle, go on down to Colombia, down where they got no law at all. Fred C. is out of this story! Where’s the damn keys? Here they are.”

With that, he hopped into the Land Rover, a second later the starter made its grinding noise, the engine caught, and headlights cut the night into the quick and the dead. The Land Rover jolted backward in a half-turn, those bright beams swinging this way, then it roared off, bouncing like a toy down the road, soon out of sight, then out of hearing.

Valerie stood. She had the night to herself. But at least she had that road. By morning, she would be back in her room at the Fort George, enjoying a wonderful shower, and Kirby Galway and Innocent St. Michael and Vernon Vernon would all be in jail, right where they belonged.

If it hadn’t been for the headlights, everything would have been all right. Valerie had been walking almost two hours when she saw them slowly advancing, jouncing along, the beams first looking up at the sky then ducking down to stare at the road immediately ahead then snapping up to gaze at the sky again, and her first thought was: Rescue!

But her second thought was: Maybe not.

She was alone in a strange land. So far, the people she had trusted — Innocent and Vernon and to a lesser extent the driver — had proved false. So she should think very carefully before attracting the attention of whoever was coming this way.

Could this be the driver, panic over, realizing Valerie wouldn’t get far at night on foot, coming back to do the job after all? It could.

Could this be Vernon, returning to make sure his orders had been carried out? It very well could.

Could this be some other friend or ally of those people, who would smile at her and promise to take her straight to the police, but who would take her to her death instead? It most definitely could.

The headlights jerked closer. Valerie wanted to believe she could just stand here, wave her hand, and be rescued, saved, returned to Belize City. She wanted to believe it, but she turned and hurried away from the road instead, up a rocky slope where she kept feeling too exposed, because of those headlights flashing around all over the place. So she kept going, up over the top, and down into a shallow basin, and waited.

Some sort of truck engine. She couldn’t see the lights any more, but she could hear the straining engine, hear it approach, become briefly very loud, then recede, then fade away.

She waited a while longer, mostly because she was very tired, her muscles very sore. Then she made her way back up the slope, and it took much longer than she’d expected to reach the top. When she finally did, there were no headlights to be seen anywhere, so she made her way down the other side and found nothing but a narrow ravine with a little quick stream running through it.

Where was the road? She kept looking around, but in the moonlight every hill and boulder and shrub looked the same. Still, the road had to be very close by.

She never found it again. The moon had risen higher in the sky, giving marginally more light but no longer marking the east. The road was gone. It occurred to her to worry about wild animals.

She remembered from something she had read that the best way to be safe from wild animals in the wilderness was to sleep in a tree, so she chose a rough-barked thick-trunked tree near the crest of a hill and with some difficulty climbed up to a crotch about seven feet from the ground, where she did her best to become reasonably comfortable, and to sleep.

No wild animals found her in the tree, but many mosquitoes did. They kept her awake a long while, until at last nothing in the world could keep her awake any longer, and she slept, crumpled up in the tree crotch, being fed on all night by nasty little flying things.

In the morning she was so stiff, and so hot, and so itchy, and so dry, and so hungry, and so uncomfortable, she thought she would die. She thought it would be more comfortable to die. Twisting around in the tree crotch, every movement an agony, she searched from her vantage point for the road — for any road or any other sign of human existence — and saw nothing but woods, forests, jungle growth, high mountains to the west and south, a broken tumbled landscape untouched by man. Sighing, she made her creaky painful way down from the tree and plodded off northward, guided now by the sun.

At first her spirits weren’t really low, because she was distracted by her training. Her studies in archaeology and her interest in the ancient Mayans had led her to Belize in the first place, and now here she really was, in conditions as primitive as anything the Mayans ever faced, crossing broken barren ground they had crossed a thousand years ago.

They had survived. She would survive. In the meantime, were there discoveries to be made in this wilderness, finds of archaeological interest and importance? She surveyed every rut and arroyo, frowned at every rock.

And yet, the distraction wasn’t total. In the back of her mind, she already knew this wasn’t an adventure of the kind she’d dreamed of while half dozing over her textbooks. She had imagined a life of purpose and work with some limited hardships — nothing a sturdy pair of boots couldn’t handle — but not all this, this, this...

Danger.

Confusion.

Trouble.

She had come out to find the world, knowing she knew nothing about the world, and was this it? A hot and stony place, alone, with no comforts and no certainties. All her old beliefs seemed to flow out of her with her perspiration, leaving her miserable and confused and dizzy. Plodding along, walking because there was nothing else to do, she soon forgot to look at stones for significance, holes in the ground for meaning. Here was the meaning: There was no meaning.

She hadn’t wanted to know any of this.

The next three days were terrible. In the middle of the day she would rest in whatever shade she could find, while all morning and all afternoon she walked northward, seeing no one, never finding any road. Each night she slept in another uncomfortable tree. The occasional quick cold stream provided water for bathing and drinking, and on the morning of the third day a brief torrential downpour did her laundry, but she never did find anything to eat. Berries, she thought, but there were no berries. Roots, she thought, but had no idea how to recognize an edible root nor where to dig for it nor what to dig for it with.

I could die out here, she thought, getting lightheaded from the sun and the lack of food. The thought was frightening, but what was even more frightening was that the thought was also tempting. To give up the struggle, to lie down and rest, to stop being hungry and itchy and tired and stiff. She fought off that temptation by thinking about Innocent St. Michael, and Kirby Galway, and Vernon, and Fred C. She would not die. They would not get away with it. She would live through this experience somehow, and bring those devils to justice! Thus thinking, while her shoes disintegrated on her feet and her sunburned skin peeled and her empty stomach begged for something more than cold water, Valerie soldiered on.

It was near sundown on the third day when, coming up along another stream, starting to look for tonight’s tree, she had stumbled into this little Indian village, where a great fuss had been made of her and where the head man, Tommy Watson, had announced, “It’s Sheena, Queen of the Jungle!”

And so that’s who she was, and who she had been for a week. The tribespeople had fed her and given her a place to sleep, and the next morning had treated all her many cuts and scratches and abrasions; not with ancient tribal remedies but with mercurochrome and Unguentine and Band-Aids. “From the mission,” they told her.

The mission. If she were to go to the mission, surely she would be safe? But then she thought again about the man she was dealing with, Innocent St. Michael, an important government official, a rich and powerful man, and she realized two frightening things: First, he must know she had the evidence to bring him down. Second, he must know his henchman had failed to silence her.

Wouldn’t a man like Innocent St. Michael have spies all over the country? Even assuming the absolute probity and integrity of whatever priests or doctors or nurses might be at the mission, wouldn’t there be other people there as well, locals who could betray her? And how safe from Innocent St. Michael would she be in a small and isolated mission deep in the jungle?

The same fears kept her from telling the truth to her benefactors, the Indians of South Abilene. At first she claimed to be suffering amnesia, but that piqued their curiosity too much, so at last she let them understand she was a rich girl who was running away from a marriage arranged by her father. She had been flying her own small plane when an unexpected storm had dashed her against a jungle mountain. The rest they knew.

They were delighted by that story, and made her tell it over and over, with more and more details. She added yachts, a severe limp to the elderly wealthy groom, a dipsomaniac mother helpless to save her daughter from being sold to the highest bidder. (Her Kekchi improved and improved.) They lapped it up, wide-eyed, loving every minute of it, and agreed the best thing she could do was stay here in South Abilene until her father would be so amazed and relieved to see her still alive that he would allow her to call off the wedding.

“And you’re a pilot,” Tommy Watson said.

“That’s right.”

“We got a pal who’s a pilot. Nice fella. You and him, you’d get along terrific.”

“Wait a minute,” said one of the young women, whose name was Rosita Coco. “Just wait a minute, okay?”

Her brother Luz told her, “Just for friends, that’s all.” (Luz and Rosita and Tommy were the only ones who talked to Valerie in English.)

“That’s right,” Tommy told Rosita. “They could talk pilot talk together.”

Instead of which, in the days ahead, Valerie and Rosita talked girl talk together, and when Valerie heard the story this pilot had told Rosita she was just outraged. Wasn’t it like a man, every time? Valerie put Rosita straight on that fellow, and though Rosita didn’t want to believe her pilot was lying, the evidence was pretty clear.

Generally speaking, Valerie got along with all the South Abilenos, male and female, young and old. They accepted her at once, shared their small bounty with her, and — encouraged no doubt by her knowledge of their tongue — allowed her to enter at least as an observer into their social lives. What an ideal position for an idealistic young archaeologist!

The one fly in the ointment in all this was marijuana. The whole village appeared to be addicted to it, and spent most nights puffing themselves insensible. In order not to appear prudish, Valerie begged off by claiming a respiratory disease that prohibited her from smoking in all its forms. “Poor Sheena,” Rosita said, “I make you some pot tortillas some day, blow you right out of the tree.” Valerie managed a smile and an expression of gratitude, but so far, thankfully, nothing had come of the offer.

Actually, for Valerie these days marijuana would be superfluous. She was high already, high on just being alive and high on this wonderful village in which she found herself. Her initial fears that she might be sexually mistreated faded rapidly when she saw how thoroughly this was a family village; life here was too open and monogamy too ingrained for any hanky-panky. (Had a few of the boys first met Valerie away from town it might have been a different story, of which she remained happily ignorant.)

But the point was, these were Mayas, true Mayas. Unlike the other archaeologists Valerie had known, her teachers and her contemporaries, she had gone through the time barrier, had actually entered into the ancient civilization the other scholars only studied. It is true these people were no longer temple builders, were merely the decayed remnant of a once flourishing culture, but their clothing (apart from the inevitable blue jeans) bore echoes of ancient themes, ancient designs, ancient decoration. The faces of the people were the same as the faces on bowls and stelae a thousand years old.

And they still made the old artifacts! When Valerie first stumbled on their little factory, where stone whistles and bone statues and terracotta bowls were being manufactured by men and women alike, they seemed almost embarrassed at having her know, as though wanting to practice the ancient crafts in secrecy and privacy. But when she extolled their abilities, when she spoke knowledgeably of their sources and their craft — hurriedly inventing an archaeologist boy friend in college, to explain the rich girl’s sudden expertise — when she expressed her true admiration, they lit up, smiled together, almost shyly showed her examples of their work.

“But this is wonderful!” she said, over and over.

“Do you really think so?”

“But yes, yes! Why—” turning a bone statuette of a leaping jaguar “—you could put this on display in any museum in the world, and no one would guess it was anything but a thousand years old!”

“I’m really glad to hear you say that, Sheena,” Tommy said. “That makes us all feel really good.”

What charming people. What a delightful simple lifestyle; except, of course, for the addiction to marijuana. Civilization with its medicine and information was as near as the mission, and otherwise their lives were idyllic. I wonder how long I’ll stay, Valerie thought from time to time, and every reminder that she must eventually leave this Eden saddened her, made her turn her mind to something else.

But now Kirby Galway had appeared! Out of the blue, quite literally out of the blue.

Earlier today Tommy had come by to say, “Listen, Sheena, there’s a guy coming today to pick up some stuff. We make some goods for market, you know, tourist stuff.”

Valerie could imagine: glossy mahogany statues of Maya priests, cheap pieces of decorated cloth. The sort of thing primitive people do all around the world, debasing their culture for currency, hard cash.

“Probably,” Tommy had gone on, “you ought to stay here in town. You don’t want this guy spreading the word there’s a white woman hiding out in South Abilene.”

“You’re absolutely right,” Valerie said, and stayed out of sight when the plane first came over. Then some time later she heard it leave, and came out of the hut, and was walking around waiting for everybody to come back when all at once there was the plane again, diving right down at the village! Into the nearest hut she had run, the image of the plane burned into her mind, and at once she remembered where she’d seen that plane before. It was Galway, Kirby Galway.

Which Rosita confirmed, when she came back: “You know Kirby?” she asked.

“Kirby Galway,” Valerie said, excited, “that’s right, that’s his name!”

Rosita’s eyes got very wide. “You know him, Sheena?”

Oh-oh. The implications could be very bad. Kirby Galway’s relationship with these Indians could be simple and benign — merely flying their tawdry commercial gewgaws to town and no doubt cheating them mercilessly — but nevertheless Galway and the Indians were aligned. Did Valerie at this point dare tell the truth?

No.

Thinking fast, she said, “I certainly do know him, Rosita, and let me tell you, he’s a very bad man!”

“Oh, I thought he was,” Rosita said. “You bet I did. He rape you one time, did he?”

“No, no,” Valerie said, then wished she’d said yes-yes; it would paint him blacker in Rosita’s eyes. Instead, she said, “He used to work for Winthrop.”

Rosita was impressed. “Wintrop Cartwright?” she asked. “The man your papa gone make you marry?”

“Yes. He worked for Winthrop and cheated Winthrop very badly. This was a few years ago,” she added, not knowing how long the Indians and Galway might have known one another.

“Well, ain’t that something,” Rosita said, and gazed away sharp-eyed at the empty sky. “Next time he come around here,” she said, “I think I give him a spider in his ear.”

“You mean a flea in his ear,” Valerie said.

“Oh, no, I don’t,” Rosita said.

5 Boots and Saddle

It was embarrassing at first, but also rather funny. Gerry winked at a boy in Sheridan Square who then turned out to be a girl, who gave him such a glare. Giggling to himself, Gerry walked on through the slushy snow toward home, waving at a friend in the window of the bar called Boots & Saddle, continuing on his way, wishing he could share the funny moment with Alan — “I winked at a very nice hunk in Sheridan Square who turned out to be some awful dike in full drag” — but Alan would think the point of the story was his winking rather than the sexual confusion, and there’d just be argument and upset and wild talk about disease, and Gerry just didn’t think he could face it, so he decided not to mention it at all.

What he needed, he reflected, not for the first time, was a boyfriend on the side, someone he could really talk to.

The sun was shining today, but the wind-chill factor was somewhere down around your ankles. Walking west on Christopher Street, looking at the anemic milky sky over the Hudson River, Gerry found himself thinking again of Belize. That had been rather fun, really, in parts, and God knows it was warm. It had been a mistake to play investigative reporter for Hiram, just too nerve-wracking.

If they’d simply gone down there on their owny-own—

To actually deal with Kirby Galway? To actually buy smuggled pre-Columbian artifacts for resale?

Well, maybe that wouldn’t have been such a bad idea at that.

The more Gerry thought it over, in fact, the more he believed he and Alan had been hasty in talking to Hiram, and in deciding the point of that story — like the wink and the dike — was a magazine article exposing the racket rather than the potential of the racket itself. He hadn’t quite had the courage yet to broach the subject with Alan, so of course he had no idea if Alan were still content with their having sacrificed themselves for king and country.

Entering the lobby of his home, Gerry sighed, thinking just how difficult it was to understand Alan, to follow his moods, to cater to him. We all have our crosses to bear, he thought, and went over to the mailboxes.

The usual bills. A tacky postcard from a friend wintering in New Orleans. And a blue and white envelope containing a cablegram. A cablegram? Gerry went to the elevator, which for once was right here on the first floor, boarded, pushed his button, and ripped the cablegram as the elevator started up.

“Al-an!” Gerry called, entering the apartment, waving the cablegram in front of himself, all thought of the wink-dike story fled from his brain. “Alan, you will simply not believe this!”

Alan appeared, covered with flour. So they’d be eating in tonight; good. “All right, Gerry,” he said, very testily (he was wonderful in the kitchen, but it was bad for his nerves), “what now? I’m in the middle of things here, I hope this is important, not some silliness.”

“Al-an,” Gerry said, aggrieved. “Would I disturb you for nothing at all?”

“You would, and you have. Well? What is it?”

“Oh, you take the heart out of everything,” Gerry said. Tossing the cablegram on the nearest table, he said, “Read it for yourself,” and went on into the bedroom to sulk.

Well, of course Alan came in three minutes later, flour washed off, black apron removed, cablegram in hand, to say, “Gerry, you’re absolutely right. I was abominable.”

“It’s only because you’re cooking,” Gerry said, having decided to be magnanimous. “I know what it does to you, but it’s perfectly all right, it’s worth it, because I know what comes out of your kitchen is just fabulous.”

“Gerry,” Alan said, positively blushing with pleasure, “you are in truth the sweetest person, I don’t know what I ever did to deserve you. The good fairy brought you to me.”

“I am your good fairy,” Gerry said, beaming, happy they’d made up. Pointing to the cablegram, he said, “And what do you think of that?”

“This.” Alan held the cablegram up, frowned at it. “I just don’t know,” he said.

“Al-an, it’s from Kirby Galway!”

“I know that.”

“He still wants to do business with us!”

“He says so.”

“He says so? He says this Sunday, in Florida!”

“I know he does,” Alan said. But still he frowned and looked disapproving.

Gerry couldn’t understand it at all. “Al-an,” he said, “this is wonderful news!”

“If true.”

“Alan, for heaven’s sake, what’s the problem?”

“Our missing tapes,” Alan said.

“Oh, dear,” Gerry said, suddenly seeing it all.

“This could be a trap, Gerry. If Kirby Galway is the one who arranged to steal our tapes...”

“Oh, dear, oh, dear,” Gerry said, and the doorbell rang.

Alan frowned. “That’s the upstairs bell,” he said.

“Then it must be Hiram,” Gerry said, starting out of the bedroom. “We can ask him what he thinks.”

“At this hour?” Alan was finding fault with everything, as usual. “I don’t know, Gerry,” he called, as Gerry went on through the apartment toward the front door. “That door downstairs has been funny lately, it—”

“Oh, it’s bound to be Hiram,” Gerry called back.

“Yesterday I saw him going out with suitcases.”

“Oh, who else could it be?” Gerry called, flung open the door, and found himself staring at the mobster he’d seen with Kirby Galway back in Belize. “My God!” he cried.

“My God!” cried the mobster, recoiling.

Gerry would have slammed the door in a trice if his own feelings of shock and terror had not been so vividly mirrored on the mobster’s face. A mobster displaying shock and terror?

“The drug dealer!”

Oh, dear, oh, dear: Gerry had cried that out, but the mobster had also cried it out, at the same instant, pointing at Gerry, who now said, “But you’re the drug dealer!”

Wide-eyed, the mobster said, “Kirby Galway told me you—”

“Kirby Galway told us you—”

“Gerry, for heaven’s sake, who is it?” Alan called, from deeper in the apartment.

“It’s— It’s— I don’t know!”

“I am Whitman Lemuel,” the ex-mobster was saying, extending his card. “I am assistant curator of the Duluth Museum of Pre-Columbian Art.”

Gerry took the card. He looked at it with a sense that the world was spinning, the entire Earth flipping on its axis. “I don’t understand,” he said.

“I think I’m beginning to,” said Whitman Lemuel. “I was given a real run-around down there in Belize—”

“Oh, so were we!”

“I was told your names, and asked questions about you, by a man named Innocent St. Michael.”

“I’ve never heard of him.”

“Consider yourself lucky.”

“Oh, my God!” Alan cried, putting in an appearance, staring at Whitman Lemuel.

“Alan, Alan, it’s all right,” Gerry said, clutching at Alan’s arm, stopping him from fleeing back to the nearest phone.

“All right? All right?” Alan pointed a trembling finger at Whitman Lemuel. “How can that be all right?”

“Kirby Galway lied to us.”

“To all of us,” Whitman Lemuel said. “After I got back to Duluth, I started to think about things, and it seemed to me maybe I hadn’t entirely understood everything that went on down there.”

Gerry was showing Whitman Lemuel’s card to Alan, saying, “See? Look.” Turning back, he said, “Mister Lemuel, I think we all should sit down and have a talk.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Lemuel said, and came into the apartment.

“Well, for God’s sake,” Alan said, staring at Lemuel’s card.

“And to begin with,” Gerry told their guest, “there’s a cablegram we just got that you will find very interesting reading.”

6 Sand and Sail

The sun rose out of the Caribbean, pouring blue on the black water, lighter blue on the great vaulted dome of sky. The islands awoke, palm trees nodding good morning, all the way from Trinidad and Tobago in the south up to Anguilla and Sint Maarten in the north. The sudden tropic dawn moved westward toward Jamaica and beyond, out over the flexing waters, winking next at the tiny dots of the Cayman Islands. Hundreds of miles of open sea awoke with yawning mouths until the sun reached the great barrier reef along the Central American coast; nearly 200 north/south miles of coral reef and tiny islands called cayes, just offshore from Belize. Hurrying to that coast, in a rush to get inland and raise the great green hulks of the Maya Mountains, the sun met a tiny plane coming the other way.

Kirby yawned, squinted in the sunshine, and settled himself more comfortably at the controls. Dew dried on Cynthia’s wings, removing her jewelry. Eggs and tomato and coffee made themselves comfortable in Kirby’s stomach.

Out ahead was the coast. The sea was shallow between here and the reef, the green water so clear as to be invisible from the air, so that you seemed to look down on an exposed world of sand and grass and coral formations all in shades of gleaming green. Only when you flew very low could the surface of the water be made out, as a kind of pebbled glass through which you studied the airborne ballet lessons of the schools of fish.

At the northern end of the great reef lies Ambergris Caye, largest of the islands, 30 miles long and two blocks wide, containing a dozen small hotels and a little fishing village called San Pedro, with a single-runway airstrip. Kirby rolled in there at 7:45, Cynthia’s shadow landing on the grass swath beside the strip. He parked her with the half dozen one-or two-engine planes already waiting here, checked in at the office shack, and strolled into town, looking for a live one.

Much of Belize’s small tourist industry is centered on Ambergris Caye. Fishing, snorkeling, scuba diving, all are at their best along the barrier reef. The hotel bars boast a mix of local entrepreneurs, sunburned American tourists, tipsily smiling remittance men, crew-cutted British soldiers on R&R, whisky-voiced widows, and pale-eyed leathery people who forgot to go home 30 years ago. There are always a few large private boats from Texas or Louisiana tied up at the hotel piers, and up and down the long skinny island are a scattering of the vacation homes of well-off Americans.

Some of these Americans were in business in a small way in Belize, running tourist hotels or exporting mahogany and rosewood or dealing in real estate or owning farms over on the mainland. Every once in a while, one of them could be persuaded to do a deal in pre-Columbian artifacts.

San Pedro starts early and finishes late. Kirby strolled through the bright morning sun to Ramon’s Reef Resort and had a cup of coffee at the open-air bar with a couple of fishermen; doctors from St. Louis, not in quite the right league. Their guide and boat arrived, they left, and Kirby wandered down the beach to the Hide-A-Way, had an iced tea there — the day was getting hot — and headed back to town. He had lunch at The Hut with a pilot he knew and a real estate man he was just meeting, heard some gossip, told some lies, heard some lies, told some gossip, and went strolling again.

In the bar at the Paradise, north end of town, most elaborate of the cabana-style hotels, he got into conversation with a Texas girl of about 30, whose daddy’s boat was moored at the end of the hotel pier. Three-story-high boat, gleaming white with gold trim, tapering from a wide, comfortable below-deck to a high, teetery-looking bridge. On the stem in golden script was its name and home port: The Laughing Cow, South Padre Island, Tx. “There’s a cheese called that,” Kirby said. “A French cheese, La Vache Qui Rit.”

“It’s Daddy’s favorite cheese spread,” she said. She was an ash blonde, tanned the color of human sacrifice, with something just a little vague in her pale eyes and just a little loose around the edges of her generous mouth. She had the look of someone who wants something but can’t quite remember what it is, or what it’s called. She herself was called Tandy.

Kirby said, “Your daddy named his boat after a cheese? I figured he was a rancher or something.”

“Oh, he is,” Tandy said. “Up home in Texas, we got a big spread. Get it?”

“I guess I do,” Kirby said. “Funny thing, I once named something after that cheese, too. La Vache Qui Rit. Except I spelled it differently.”

“You want to see the boat?”

“Sure.”

They carried their glasses of rum and grapefruit juice across the burning sand and out the weathered pier to The Laughing Cow. It was Daddy that Kirby was most interested in, but he wasn’t aboard right now. “He’s gone ashore to raise some supplies,” she said. In the bar she’d been wearing white shorts and a pale blue polo shirt, but now she put down her drink, stepped out of her clothes, and revealed a dark blue bikini on the kind of body it was designed for. “This is the main cabin,” she said, pointing at the main cabin, picking up her drink again.

Tandy took him through the boat, telling him what every thing was: “That’s the refrigerator,” she’d say, pointing at the refrigerator. “That’s the shower. That’s my bunk.”

They made their way by stages to the bridge, where Tandy finished the tour by pointing at the wheel and saying, “And that’s the wheel.”

“And there’s the Caribbean Sea,” Kirby said, nodding at it.

“Oh, look at the sailboat!”

Just offshore, a sloop with two white sails slid peacefully northward. Shading his eyes, Kirby said, “Yeah, I know that boat. It’s full of sand.”

Tandy looked ready to laugh, just in case there was a joke somewhere inside there. Kirby looked at her, serious, and said, “No, no fooling. It’s full of sand. On its way up to one of the construction sites farther up the island.”

Tandy frowned. “Where is this sand from?” she asked.

“The mainland, down below Belize City.”

Tandy looked back at the Paradise Hotel: a half-circle of cabanas and other buildings on raked white sand. She looked at Kirby again, and her expression now said she was getting a trifle irritated. “Just why, Kirby,” she asked, “would anybody haul sand from Belize City to out here?”

“River sand,” he explained. “This sand here is coral, it’s powdery, they don’t like to use it for mixing up cement. So that boat there goes back and forth, usually brings sand, sometimes gravel. All by sail-power, no engines.”

“How long does it take?”

“Five to six hours out, four to five back. They’ll shovel it out tonight, head back early in the morning, load it up again when they get to the mainland, lay over the night, and head back this way day after tomorrow.”

She looked out again at the sloop, now beyond them, making better speed than it looked. “Shit,” she said, “and I thought it was romantic.”

“It is romantic,” Kirby said.

She thought about that. “I see what you mean,” she said.

“Just sailing and sailing,” Kirby said. “A few hours shoveling at each end, that’s not much of a price to pay.”

“No price to pay at all,” she said, sounding bitter. “When all you got to shovel is sand.” She knocked back her drink and looked at him. “How about you, Kirby?” she said. “You romantic?”

“Very,” Kirby said, and a hoarse voice shouted, “Tandy?”

Daddy was back, with three San Pedrans carrying cardboard cartons. Daddy barked orders and distributed U.S. greenbacks, while Tandy took Kirby’s glass and her own and made fresh drinks in the galley. Daddy and the drinks were finished at the same time, and Tandy made introductions: “Daddy, this is Kirby Galway. I just picked him up in the bar there.”

If that was supposed to be provocative, Daddy ignored it. Sticking his hand out, staring at Kirby hard, he said, “Darryl Pinding, Senior.”

“How do you do, sir?” (It seemed to Kirby that Darryl Pinding, Senior, would enjoy hearing “sir” just once from a younger man.)

“I do fine, Kirby. And yourself?”

“I have nothing to complain about,” Kirby told him.

“Good. Tandy, did you make me a drink?”

“I will now.”

She went off to do so, and Darryl Pinding, Senior, gestured at the blue vinyl, saying, “Sit down, Kirby, take a load off. What business you in?”

It was fun talking with Darryl Pinding, Senior. He was a rich man who thought his money proved he was smart. He knew a lot about three or four things, and thought that meant he knew everything about everything. He liked to spray his imperfect knowledge around like a male lion spraying semen. He was a big man in his 50s, probably a football player in college, now gone very thick but not particularly soft. Sun, sea, high life, and skin cancer had turned him piebald, particularly on his broad high forehead, where Kirby counted patches of four separate shades of color, not counting the liver spots.

Tandy grew grumpy when it became clear that Kirby was not going to cut short the conversation with Daddy. She threatened to leave, then left, while Kirby and Darryl (they were both on first-name terms now) chatted on.

It was established early that strict legality had never been an absolute prerequisite in Darryl’s life; a plus. Somewhat later it was made clear that Darryl had done a bit of smuggling for profit in his life — a boat like this, why not? — and had enjoyed the raffish self-image as much as the money; another plus. Treading slowly, Kirby established that Darryl did know something about pre-Columbian artifacts, though by no means as much as he thought he knew. Darryl also understood vaguely that the southern governments were trying to stem the flow of antiquities northward, and he thought they were damn fools and pig-ignorant for taking such a position; a major plus.

But then came the down side: “Let me tell you something, Kirby,” Darryl said four or five drinks later, hunkering a bit closer on the vinyl. “My son is a faggot. Do you hear what I’m telling you?”

“Uhh, yes.”

“I don’t know how it happened. God knows he didn’t have a domineering mother or an absent father, but there it is. Darryl Junior is gay as a jay.”

“Ah,” said Kirby.

“He’s an artist,” Darryl said, with an angry sneer in his voice. “Out in San Francisco. Artist. These pre-Columbian things, statues, all this stuff. You know what it all is?”

Kirby looked alert.

“Art,” Darryl said. “It’s all art.”

“I guess it is,” Kirby said.

“I hate art.” Darryl nodded. “Nuff said?”

“Nuff said,” Kirby agreed.

He had dinner at El Tulipan with a girl named Donna who ran one of the gift shops in town. They had drinks after at Fido’s, listening to Rick play the piano, Rick announcing to the world at large, “I’m getting drunk, but I never make mistakes.” Donna had to retire early, so Kirby roved on, not expecting much, having used up his psychic energy on Darryl Pinding, Senior, just fooling around now.

Back at Fido’s around midnight, there was Tandy at the bar, talking with two American college boys. She left them, carried her glass over to Kirby, and said, “You and Daddy all talked out?”

“Your father’s a forceful personality,” Kirby said.

“I didn’t see you fight him off much,” she said.

Kirby looked at her. “Honey,” he said, “if you haven’t got ahead of him in thirty years, how do you expect me to do it in an hour?”

She blinked. She frowned. “Twenty-eight,” she said, and knocked back some of her drink.

“My apologies.”

“The sun ages you,” she said, forgiving him. “Every fucking thing ages you, come to that. Where are you staying?”

“Nowhere yet.”

Surprised, she managed to focus on him, saying, “You don’t have a hotel room?”

“Not yet.”

She laughed, a throaty chuckle that suggested the baritone she would be in 20 years. “You’re a damn beach bum!” she said.

“I told you earlier,” he patiently explained, “I flew in this morning, thought I might fly out again this afternoon, never got around to it.”

“That’s right, you’re a pilot, I forgot. Come on and sleep on the Cow.”

He considered that. “Daddy?”

“When Daddy sleeps, Daddy sleeps. That’s one place, Kirby, where I will not put up with trouble.”

He gave her an admiring grin. “Tandy, you’re an interesting woman. You have depths.”

“Check it out,” she said.

If Daddy slept through all that, his subconscious must have thought they were sailing through a hurricane. Tandy’s elegantly cramped quarters were below, a long isosceles triangle beneath the foredeck, while Daddy slept in the convertible sitting lounge above. A small air conditioner competed with the capacity of two active human bodies to generate heat, and lost. Everybody’d had a bit too much to drink, Tandy refused to permit any light at all, and The Laughing Cow bobbed and rolled in its mooring in arhythmic sequences that Kirby could never quite adapt to. The whole thing became as much an engineering problem as anything else, but one well worth the solving. Slippery rubbery flesh slid and tumbled, muscles moved beneath the skin, arms and hands reached for purchase and slid away. “I think it goes like this,” Kirby said.

“Oh, Jesus. That’s the way, that’s the way.”

Kirby chewed on a nipple that tasted of salt. Breath in his ear sounded like far-off surf. The rhythms of sea and man merged and separated, merged and separated. “God, I’m thirsty!” Tandy cried, and collapsed like a sail, in the calm after a storm. Kirby had never heard a woman say precisely that in such a situation before.

A lot of elbows woke him, some of them his own. Cool darkness, the hush of a nearby air conditioner, all these elbows and knees and — ouch — foreheads in this too-small bunk. Memory came to his rescue just as Tandy patted him all over, hoarsely whispering, “Who the fuck are you?”

“Kirby Galway,” he told her. “I’m the pilot. One of the better guys.” “Shit,” she said, “you probably are, at that.” She laid her hot dry head on his chest, and he put an arm around her vulnerable thin shoulders. “What a life,” she said, and they slept.

7 Glimpses

The sun that had greeted Kirby in the sky early that morning had a little later peeked down through the moist layers of leaf and branch and vine and foliage to the jungle floor in the Maya Mountains near the Guatemalan border where it caught glimpses of a hunched hurrying figure in camouflage fatigues, moving west, staring about himself, nervous, flinching from every jungle sound, occasionally staring up in anguish at the watching sun, as though it were a hawk and he a vole.

Vernon panted as he moved, more from fear than exertion. He hadn’t expected another summons from the Colonel so soon, nor had he realized before last night just how completely he was in the Colonel’s power. He could no longer refuse the man, was no longer his own master. The Colonel could destroy Vernon at any time, not by reaching into his holster for that big Colt .45, but simply by passing on to the British Army or the Belizean government the proof of Vernon’s...

... treason.

“It means nothing” Vernon gasped, hurrying to meet his master. Guatemala could never invade, could never capture Belize. Taking the Colonel’s money was dishonorable, yes, chicanery at worst, because it was not within Vernon’s power, or anyone’s power, to sell Belize to Guatemala. And yet, and yet...

Everything was coming together at once, in the most terrible way. He had murdered Valerie Greene, yes he had, he had murdered her just as surely as if he had done it himself with his own hand. But he was not cut out to be a murderer; too late he understood that. He wanted to be a man with no conscience at all, and he was riddled with conscience as another man might be riddled with leprosy. The sting of his petty treason was as nothing to the savage bum of his guilt as a murderer.

And just as the Colonel held Vernon’s fate and future in the palm of his hand, so did the skinny black man, Vernon’s partner in murder. He had disappeared without a word, without a word except for a circular trail of Land Rover parts around Punta Gorda. Presumably he had fled the country; certainly, the police were looking for him. Could it be (astonishing idea) that he too had been unequal to murder, had been unhinged by it, driven to flight? If so, and if he were found, he would surely spill the whole story, starting with Vernon’s name.

“Too many things,” Vernon muttered, thrashing through the undergrowth, the moisture of his face part sweat and part dew and part tears. The wet fronds slapped at him, the ground was soggy and treacherous beneath his feet, and he could never entirely hide from the sun.

The Daimler wasn’t yet there. Good; it gave Vernon a chance to get control of himself, calm down, dry his dripping face on his shirttail. He walked back and forth in the clearing, in and out of sunlight, commanding himself to be at peace. The Colonel would not betray him, because he was still too useful. The skinny black man would not be found and would not return. Be calm, he told himself, be tranquil, be at rest.

How he longed to be at rest.

The Daimler came slowly through the jungle, like a whale, like a black puddle. Vernon stood to the side of the dirt track as the Daimler approached, sunlight winking at him from its glass and chrome. The big machine stopped beside him, its passenger compartment window slid smoothly down, and the Colonel appeared in the dark rectangle, leaning forward, eyes hidden by large dark sunglasses. Behind him the feral woman sat reading a French magazine: Elle, Vernon, inadequately protected behind his own sunglasses, blinked and blinked.

The Colonel extended a ringed hand out the window, holding a white envelope. “This is for you,” he said.

Vernon took the envelope. It was softly thick with currency, a lot of currency. What does he want from me? Why did things always have to move so inexorably from the theoretical to the real?

The Colonel had something else for him; a single sheet of paper. Vernon took it, and saw it was a Xerox of a part of one of the maps he’d given the Colonel the last time, a map showing recent refugee settlements. One of these was now circled in red. As he frowned at this map, wondering what it meant, the Colonel said, “On Friday, the day after tomorrow, a group of British journalists will be in Belice.”

“Journalists?” Vernon reluctantly looked up from the map. “I don’t know anything about that.”

“They are coming,” the Colonel said. “One of the things they will do in Belice is visit a refugee village, on Friday afternoon.” Pointing at the map in Vernon’s hands, he said, “You will see to it that is the village they visit.”

“But— Journalists? That has nothing to do with my department, I don’t—”

“You have a driver? Your confederate?”

Shocked that the Colonel knew so much about him, Vernon stammered, “He’s— he’s gone. Ran away a week ago. No-nobody knows why.”

“Someone else then,” the Colonel said, dismissing the problem with a flick of his fingers. The woman turned a page of her magazine; this time, she had no interest in Vernon at all. The Colonel, delegating authority, said, “You’ll arrange it. The journalists go to that village.”

“I don’t know if I can—”

“It is necessary,” the Colonel said. He confronted Vernon, impassive behind his dark glasses, waiting for another objection, prepared to slap it down. It is necessary; that was all his creature needed to know.

I will not think about why the Colonel wants all these things, Vernon told himself, his plans are foolishness and vain, nothing can happen, nothing can change. “I–I’ll try,” he said miserably.

“That village,” the Colonel said, and the window smoothly rolled up, ending the conversation.

Bewildered, bedeviled, hopelessly entangled, Vernon stood and watched the Daimler drive away, returning the Colonel to his world of certainties. Rest. Tranquility. What was going to happen? Would it never end? What terrible fate was he fashioning for himself?

Nearby, in bright sun, a large parrot on a branch looked at Vernon, spread his wings, and laughed.

8 North Guatemala: Me Taught Ron

The Indians of the Central American forests are peasants, farmers who scratch a living and a life from the rich jungle soil. Their ancestors have lived on that soil and been buried in that soil for 2,000 years. They have endured famine and flood, disease and wild animals, fire and enemy tribes; but whatever has happened, the passive Indians have always stayed with the land.

Today, the Indians want no more and no less than what they have always had; a piece of land in the jungles, small interrelated communities, and to be left alone. But today Central America is a part of the great world, and in the great world no one is left alone. The Indians cannot fight the death squads armed with submachine guns and the soldiers armed with helicopters. They can expect no mercy from the Ladinos who call them “animals with names.” Almost unbelievably, driven beyond endurance, the Indians are leaving their land.

Refugees. After thousands of years, they have become refugees. The Miskito Indians have been in almost constant harried motion through Honduras and Nicaragua for the last three or four years, chivvied and persecuted by “civilized” men, driven to distraction. More truly civilized men and women in private religious groups have been helping Salvadoran and Guatemalan peasants relocate in Canada, and what on Earth shall they think of Canada? And some, in tribal and family groups of 10 or 20 or 50, thousands of them by now, have made the terrible, long, dangerous overland journey to the border of Belize, and across it... to heaven.

It is the jungle, as at home, but a wonderfully empty jungle, with miles and miles of unclaimed territory in which to scratch out a piece of land and start to live again. No armed masked men rove at night. The only military aircraft is the occasional British Harrier jet, gone almost before it arrives, flashing along the border to remind the Guatemalans of the futility of their dreams.

The refugees arrive, fearful, ignorant, almost without hope. They begin their settlements, hiding as best they can from the world, and in a week or six months or a year they are found and the Belizean government sends its emissary to them; a social worker, perhaps, or an unarmed policeman, or a medical officer. They are told they have been accepted as immigrants; there are no formalities and they shall not be returned to hell. So long as they live on their piece of land, and use it, it is theirs. So long as they mind their own business, they will be left alone. The government is not their enemy, and is not at war with them. It asks only that they send their children to school: “We want to make good Belizeans of them.”

The Indians don’t entirely understand, nor entirely believe. They build their huts out of the materials available in the jungle, they work their fields, and they keep one eye over their shoulder. But nothing happens. And slowly, over the course of years, they come to realize the truth:

The war is over.

9 A Small Fortune

Innocent hardly tasted his food at all, and barely glanced at the beautiful sea. Lunching on lobster at the Chateau Caribbean, just up the bayfront from the Fort George, he had smilingly but firmly refused offers to join friends at this or that table, preferring his own gloomy company. Two Belikin beers had not restored him, nor had the sounds of happiness and good fellowship all around him. (At a nearby table, businessman Emory King, an American-born Belizean citizen, was explaining to his group, “How do you wind up with a small fortune in Belize? You start with a large fortune.”)

Valerie Greene. He simply could not get her out of his mind. This morning, doing his usual laps in the pool, it had occurred to him that Valerie had never seen his house, had never swum in his pool, and the thought had so dispirited him he’d stopped swimming at once, breaking his morning ritual for the first time in memory, trailing away unhappily to the house to get dressed.

Which was all, of course, ridiculous. None of his women had seen his house, nor swum in his pool. Take a girlfriend to that wife, those four daughters? Not a chance.

And yet, however absurd the idea might be, it still had the power to deflate him. Every thought of Valerie had the power to deflate him, in fact, rob him of happiness and contentment. And the strange thing was, as time went by his thoughts and memories were less and less about sex and more and more about her. Her smile, her naiveté, her simple worldliness, her passion for honesty and truth. In his mind, she was becoming a saint.

He avoided the word that would describe his condition. He could acknowledge — to himself — that he was grieving for her, but not even to himself could he face the reason why.

“Innocent St. Michael?”

Innocent looked up from his untouched lobster and unassuaged melancholy to see a white man looming over his table, extending a hand with a card in it. A very white man, ashen as a barracuda’s belly; just off the plane from the snowy north, no doubt. “Yes?” Innocent said, wanting nothing more than for the man to cease to exist; or at the very least, to go away.

But he wouldn’t; waggling his fingers, he said, “My card.”

Come along, Innocent, he told himself, you’re still alive. Here’s a man with a card. Here’s a North American with money in his pockets, probably looking for a little investment, some land to buy or a business to associate himself with, a man wanting to wind up with a small fortune in Belize. Take an interest, Innocent.

He took the man’s card, though not really with very much interest. The card told him the man was named Hiram Farley and he was associated with a magazine in New York City called Trend. Had Innocent managed to drum up any interest, it would now evaporate: “Reporter, eh?”

“Editor,” Hiram Farley said, and uninvited pulled out the chair to Innocent’s right. Seating himself, stacking his forearms on Innocent’s table, he said, “Mister St. Michael, how familiar are you with your nation’s Antiquities Law of 1972?”

Innocent raised an eyebrow. “The act says the Mayan ruins within Belize belong to the nation of Belize,” he said, “along with any and all contents, all others to keep bloody hands off. Is that familiar enough for you?”

“Good,” Hiram Farley said. “Fine. And since that law was passed, back in 1972, that’s been the finish of the trade in smuggled Mayan artifacts, is that right?”

“That’s called irony,” Innocent told him. “What you just did there.” Despite himself, he was becoming involved with this fellow.

Hiram Farley smiled. “Occupational hazard,” he explained. “Such a good cheap weapon, irony.” Then he switched to a keen look, saying, “Mister St. Michael, some time ago I became aware of a scheme to smuggle pre-Columbian artifacts out of Belize and into the United States.”

“Which you promptly reported to the officials of both nations,” Innocent suggested.

“Irony; that’s good. Mister St. Michael, I had no proof, only a vague rumor. Hoping to get solid documentary evidence, both to turn over to the authorities and to present in an exclusive story in my magazine—”

“Ah, yes, of course.”

“It isn’t only charity that begins at home, Mister St. Michael.”

“I don’t know much about charity, Mister Farley,” Innocent said. “Tell me what you’ve done.”

“I encouraged two friends of mine to come down here and pursue the suggestion of becoming engaged in the smuggling operation. Antique dealers from New York.”

By God: Witcher and Feldspan! Innocent became so delighted with this revelation that absolutely nothing showed on his face. So this was the reason for the taping!

And if Innocent hadn’t stepped in to remove those tapes, Kirby and his smuggling operation would right now be plastered all over the pages of Trend magazine!

And Valerie? Would she be alive or dead?

No; Trend would not have come out in time to save her.

Kirby... Kirby... Kirby would already have killed her, in any event.

Hiram Farley continued, while Innocent’s thoughts went racing. Farley explained about the tape recordings, their being stolen at the airport, and went on, “My friends — they’re not the sort for intrigues like this, certainly not for anything dangerous — they’ve made it clear they don’t have the heart to go on with the investigation, particularly if those tapes are now in the hands of the smugglers, as they almost certainly are.”

Innocent’s mind was full of thoughts of Valerie and Kirby, but he managed to follow Hiram Farley well enough to say, “So now you’ll do it yourself?”

“Mister St. Michael, I still want that story for Trend. And I imagine you would like to help save your patrimony from the thieves and smugglers.”

“But of course, Mister Farley,” Innocent said, thinking, Is this fellow a pansy-boy, too, like his friends? Yes. More subtle about it, not noticeable at all if you aren’t looking for it, but yes. On the other hand, shrewder than his friends, tougher. Not an easy fellow to take advantage of.

Farley was saying, “Mister St. Michael, I’ll level with you. After my friends threw in the towel, I looked around, asked around, trying to find somebody else with a connection in Belize. Do you remember a man named Rodemeyer? William Rodemeyer?”

The name rang a distant bell, no more. Innocent frowned, saying, “I’m not sure...”

“This would be several years ago. You sold him a piece of land in Ladyville.”

Ladyville was the little community next to the International Airport. Its future was in fact quite promising for commercial properties, should Belize ever become a considerably larger and more bustling nation than it now was. Innocent had owned different parcels out there over the years...

Rodemeyer! It came back to him now, the man with the odd name. “The magazine man!”

“That’s right,” Farley said. “He wanted to found a weekly business magazine for the English-speaking Caribbean basin.”

“Yes, I remember that man,” Innocent said. “He wanted land out by the airport, to build offices and his own printing operation out there, distribute by air through the Caribbean. Very ambitious project.”

“Too ambitious, as it turned out,” Farley said.

“Bigger circus than this come to Belize,” Innocent told himself.

“Beg pardon?”

“Nothing. Seems to me that man went bust.”

“Yes, he was undercapitalized.”

“That’s the big trouble in the Caribbean,” Innocent agreed, nodding like a statesman.

“He’s back in New York now, Rodemeyer is,” Farley said. “Working for Barron’s.”

“Aristocrats pay pretty good, I hear,” Innocent said.

“I understand he sold the land back to you before he left, for rather less than he’d paid for it.”

“Very depressed real estate market, just at that moment,” Innocent murmured.

“Yes,” agreed Farley. “The point is, Bill Rodemeyer told me he met several people in Belize, but you were the one I should see. He said you were the shrewdest, toughest con man he ever met in his life, but you were important in the government, and if there was something in it for you I could probably get you to work with me on this smuggling story.”

“I have never had anything but the nicest remarks to make about Mister Rodemeyer,” Innocent said, putting on a faintly insulted air.

Farley laughed. “And why not? You made a pretty penny off him.” Becoming more serious, he said, “I’ll let you personally break the story in Belize, and I’ll feature you prominently in the write-up in Trend. We give each other an exclusive. My information plus your local contacts, and we expose these smugglers together.”

By now, Innocent’s mind was functioning simultaneously on two completely different levels. On the surface, operating out of long practice and engrained habit, he listened to Hiram Farley, heard his ideas, decided how to play this latest fish on his line. But underneath, his mind was full to overflowing with thoughts of Valerie Greene. And where the two thoughtstreams converged was at Kirby Galway.

Kirby the smuggler. And Kirby the murderer.

“So you want to expose these smugglers in your magazine,” he said. “You want to catch them in the act, you mean, with photographs and all.”

“That would be best,” Farley agreed. “I can handle all that part of it myself. What I need from you, if you think it’s a good idea, is help on the ground.”

“To catch the smugglers,” Innocent said, brooding. To catch Kirby the smuggler; yes, that would be a good thing, with this man Farley along to get the evidence that would stick. But what about Kirby the murderer?

Farley said, “Do we have a deal, Mister St. Michael?”

“Let me think about this, Mister Farley,” Innocent said. Kirby the murderer is up to me, he thought. Inexorably he was sliding toward a decision that was very unlike him, very out of character. And yet, there it was. And still he hung back from it.

Tomorrow, he promised himself. Tomorrow I’ll choose; Farley or Kirby. “I’ll get in touch with you by tomorrow afternoon, Mister Farley,” he said, “at the Fort George.”

Farley was surprised. “How do you know I’m staying at the Fort George?”

Innocent laughed, though his mind was full of Kirby the murderer. “Every American I do business with is at the Fort George, Mister Farley,” he said.

10 Total Recoil

“Seven,” said Kirby.

“Fourteen for two,” said Manny.

Kirby grinned, and laid down a third seven. “Twenty-one for six,” he said, and moved his back peg forward six spaces on the cribbage board. Only then did he look up to see every tooth gap in Manny’s head gleaming at him; the man smiled like a tunnel entrance. “No,” said Kirby.

“Yes,” said Manny, and gently placed the fourth seven on the table. “Twenty-eight for twelve.” He leaned forward to study the board. “And the game.”

It was true; the 12 points put Manny out. “At least it wasn’t a skunk,” said Kirby, whose lead peg was 11 spaces from victory.

“What’s the score now?”

Kirby turned the board over, where ink checkmarks in groups of five ran in battalions down two strips of masking tape, which were themselves laid over previous strips bearing previous battalions. Making another mark with his ballpoint pen, Kirby said, “You’re ahead, as you damn well know.”

“How much? How much?”

“Three hundred twenty-nine games to two hundred seventy-eight.” Shaking his head, Kirby turned the board over. “I should have taught you checkers instead.”

“Teach me now.”

“You sound too eager,” Kirby told him, and glanced over as a couple of the dogs — who had been peacefully watching Guatemalan television with Estelle and the kids — got up and turned around and looked at the door.

“Somebody coming,” Manny said.

“Could be Tommy.”

Manny liked Tommy Watson well enough, but Estelle always got purse-lipped when the Indian was around, as she did now, remaining silent but giving Kirby a quick look. “I’ll talk to him outside,” Kirby promised.

And in fact he had something to tell Tommy. Yesterday’s expedition to San Pedro had been a bust, at least from a business point of view, but when he’d flown in here just before noon today — not wanting to miss Estelle’s lunch — there had been a message waiting which Cora had brought down from Orange Walk. It was Witcher and Feldspan’s answer to his cable, and it assured him Sunday would be just fine for taking delivery on the first shipment. So Kirby’s message to Tommy would be, Produce some Zotzes! Let’s start these new customers off right, with a nice platoon of devil-gods. No more excuses about how everybody’s too superstitious and afraid to make the damn things.

Estelle still looked disapproving — she felt Tommy’s mere existence was a bad influence on the children, whom she had dreams of civilizing some day — so Kirby got to his feet and said, “Okay, okay, I’ll head him off.” While Manny sat shuffling the cards like the scraggliest cardshark in history, grinning faintly to himself, Kirby went out to greet his faithful Indian companion.

Except it wasn’t. Squinting in the outer sunlight, Kirby first saw the gray Land Rover over near Cynthia, and then saw it was Innocent St. Michael who was clambering out of it. And not only that, but he was clambering out of the driver’s seat; he’d come here alone.

Here? Innocent St. Michael, here?

Kirby walked over toward the heavyset man, noticing that Innocent seemed rumpled, troubled, very unlike his usual smooth self-confident self. Innocent saw Kirby approach and reached back into the Land Rover to pick something up off the passenger seat. Kirby was just calling, “What’s happening, Innocent?” when Innocent turned around with the gun, pointed it more or less toward Kirby, and started shooting.

The gun was a British-made revolver, the Webley and Scott Mark VI, weighing two pounds six ounces, length eleven and a quarter inches, six-shot capacity, firing a .455 calibre cartridge, and famous in the British Army and in many police forces around the world for a whole lot of recoil. Wherever Innocent had gotten this monster, the thing clearly had not come with instructions, nor had he taken it around the block for a few practice spins ahead of time. He clenched his jaw, squeezed the trigger, the gun made a sharp explosive sound flattened in the surrounding air, and the bullet went up over Kirby and over the house and headed out on a rising line toward the coast.

“Hey!” said Kirby.

Innocent’s second bullet whizzed up and away southward, climbing into the sky, straining toward a far-off tree just inland from Punta Gorda.

“What the hell!” said Kirby.

Innocent’s third shot went almost straight up into the empyrean. Some time later, in fact, it landed unnoticed between Kirby and the house.

“Jesus Christ!” said Kirby.

Innocent, looking intent, exasperated, determined, flustered, enraged, grieving, and bollixed, grabbed the goddam gun with both hands and wrestled its barrel back down to point at Kirby’s nose.

“Ahhh!” said Kirby.

The fourth bullet whispered in Kirby’s left ear on the way by.

“DON’T!” said Kirby.

Innocent mumbled something and stepped closer, holding the gun out in front of himself with both hands, as though it were an angry cat. The cat spat, and bullet number five made a scratch — but cauterized it immediately — on the skin above Kirby’s left clavicle, or collarbone, which is the top of the pectoral arch, extending from the breastbone to the shoulderblade.

All of this was happening very fast, so it wasn’t until now that Kirby got around to taking appropriate action, which was to scream and hit the dirt, so that bullet number six passed through the air where the middle of Kirby’s head had recently been, then continued on its way to chunk into the door frame just as Manny opened the front door to find out what all that popping was about.

Manny looked at the spot where the bullet had said “thup” going into the wood of the frame. He looked at Innocent with the gun, and Kirby on his face on the ground. He stepped back and closed the door.

Kirby rolled over and looked up. Innocent, closer, stood over him with the expression of a man seating himself for the first time in front of a word processor; he will dope this damn thing out. Both Innocent’s hands clasped the gun, which now looked to Kirby like a round-mouthed gray metal snake with a crest (the front sight). Innocent’s right forefinger squeezed the trigger, and the Mark VI said, “Tsk.”

Neither Innocent nor Kirby could believe it. They both looked at the gun. Innocent aimed it at Kirby and pulled the trigger. “Tsk,” it said.

“Shit,” said Innocent.

“Oh, boy,” said Kirby, and rolled madly away, over and over across the dusty bumpy ground. When he sat up, filthy and dizzy, he was some yards from Innocent and the Land Rover. Shaking his head, trying to focus, he saw Innocent hurry back to the vehicle, saw him reach inside it and come out with a small cardboard box, saw him fumble the box open onto the Land Rover’s hood. A few cartridges rolled away across the hood and plopped onto the ground. “For God’s sake, he’s reloading,” Kirby said.

Somebody, unfortunately, had explained to Innocent how to open the cylinder. As Kirby struggled to his feet, still dizzy, and tottered across the open ground, Innocent pushed bullets business end forward into the cylinder. More cartridges rolled about and fell on the ground.

Innocent saw Kirby coming and backed hurriedly away, stumbling a bit, pushing just one more bullet home, struggling to close the half-full cylinder and scramble backwards at the same time, and all the while watching neither his hands nor the world behind him. Kirby, pursuing, cried, “Innocent, why? Why?”

“You killed her,” Innocent said, and slammed the cylinder shut, pinching one finger nastily in the process. He put that finger in his mouth and pointed the gun at Kirby.

Who had stopped a few paces away, too bewildered to be either scared or smart. “Killed? Who?”

“Wallawa Weeng,” Innocent said.

“Who?”

Innocent took his finger from his mouth. “Valerie Greene,” he said, “and you’re going to die for it!”

“Tsk,” said the Mark VI, as Kirby threw his arms up to protect his head.

“God damned bastard!” Innocent cried.

“I didn’t!” Kirby yelled. “Innocent, I’m innocent!”

“Tsk.”

“Shit! Where are they?”

“I didn’t do it!”

“Boom,” said the shotgun in Manny’s hands in the doorway of the house, and a number of leaf bits and twig mulch pattered down onto the tableau of Innocent and Kirby.

Innocent, wide-eyed, looked over at Manny who, untroubled by recoil, was lowering the shotgun barrel from his aim at the tree branches to a new sighting on Innocent’s torso. This piece of armament was a Ted Williams Over-and-under shotgun with 28-inch barrels, 48 inches overall, weight seven and a quarter pounds, firing either two and three-quarter or three inch standard or magnum shells in 12 gauge, available at Sears stores. Manny’s finger had already moved from the front trigger, which had just fired the modified choke lower barrel, to the rear trigger, which at any instant could unleash the contents of the full choke upper barrel.

Having no idea what Manny planned to do next, hoping against hope he wasn’t running into a blast of shotgun pellets, Kirby dashed forward, grabbed the Mark VI out of Innocent’s slack hands, and ran away holding the gun in both his hands, yelling, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

Innocent stared after him in frustration and aggravation: “How can I shoot? You took my gun!”

“Manny!” Kirby yelled in explanation. “Manny, don’t shoot!”

Manny came out of the house, the Ted Williams butt still nestled into his shoulder, cheek still lying against the hand-checkered walnut stock, right eye sighting down the ventilated rib, directly at Innocent. Estelle came out after him, looking stem, in her right hand the cleaver she used for quartering chickens. A couple of the dogs came out and trotted over to Innocent, sniffing him in search of the tastiest parts. A few children came out and arrayed themselves to one side, as audience. Innocent looked pained.

Kirby, at a safe distance from everybody, looked at the weapon of destruction lying across his palms. He turned it around, held it in his right hand like people in the movies, and pointed it down at the ground. He squeezed the trigger. “Bang!” it said, and the recoil slammed up into his arm bones hard enough to jolt his whole skeleton. “Jesus,” he whispered. One tsk from eternity.

Innocent was now looking merely weary, rumpled, and resigned. Kirby glanced at him, and walked toward the house. He passed Manny, who said, “Kirby? What do you need?”

“A drink,” Kirby said. His right shoulder hurt.

11 The Mystery of the Temple

The Indians didn’t expect the plane, Valerie could tell that from their reaction when it buzzed low over the village late in the afternoon. They loved it, of course; they seemed to love everything Kirby Galway did. They came scampering out of their huts and, driven by curiosity, every last one of them went hurrying out of town and up and over that nearby scruffy hill to meet Galway where he’d be landing. Driven by her own curiosity, Valerie followed, keeping some distance behind.

She had never been up this way before. The Indians had told her how dry and lifeless the land was over here, fit for nothing but an airstrip, and she’d noticed they themselves never came up this way except that one earlier time to meet Galway. Now, she labored up the hill and it wasn’t until she reached the top and looked down the other side at the plane taxiing across the flat land in this direction that she suddenly realized where she was.

It had to be, had to be. She and the kidnapper/driver had come in from that direction, way over there. The airplane had been parked exactly where Galway was now parking it. Her confrontation with him had taken place down there below the right flank of the hill. So this place, this place, had to be...

... the temple?

Valerie gazed about herself, wide-eyed, open-mouthed, bewildered. This was no temple. This was merely an arid brown hill, covered with a stubble of dead brush and dying stunted trees.

Could this ever have been a temple? Unlike the Egyptian pyramids, which had been actual buildings filled with rooms and spaces, the Mayan temples had been mere stone skins veneered onto existing hills, so, in the few short days after she’d first seen this place, could Galway possibly have stripped it completely, every stone and every stela, every corbel arch, every wall, every terrace and stair?

No.

Having done that one impossibility, could Galway then have gone on to remove every trace of what he’d done, every mark and indentation, every touch of the ancient Mayan builders’ hands?

Again, no.

Impossible. In fact, absurd.

“But...” Valerie said aloud, and continued to stare this way and that in total befuddlement. She had seen the temple, with her own eyes. She had stood down there, and looked up here, and had gazed upon an undoubted temple. Exactly where the computers had said it would be. Exactly where she had known it would be. And Kirby Galway had been so upset at her finding his secret temple that he’d gone absolutely berserk, threatening her with a machete, hopping up and down, throwing his hat on the—

Movement down by the plane attracted her attention. Kirby Galway himself had climbed out and was talking and gesticulating with Tommy Watson and Luz Coco and Rosita while the other villagers stood around watching, wondering as much as Valerie what was going on. But now a second person was clambering awkwardly out of the plane, making his way to the ground with the help of several Indians. Valerie’s breath caught. It was Innocent St. Michael!

She stared, forgetting the mystery of the temple. The ringleader himself, here. Ducking low, she watched through the fronds of dead foliage as the talk went on down there, Tommy and Luz now explaining some sort of situation to the other Indians, Kirby explaining, even Innocent St. Michael explaining. People started to point at Valerie.

Well, not at Valerie, but certainly uphill. Toward the village, it must be, because the whole group, still talking and explaining, set out en masse, moving in this direction.

What should she do? Crouched on her hilltop, watching the Indians and the villains climb the slope, she wondered what would be best. Hide in one of the huts, or stay away from the village until after Galway and St. Michael had gone?

They were getting closer, their voices rising toward her. Clear on the afternoon air came the sound of Kirby Galway’s voice. Unmistakably she heard him pronounce one word:

“Sheena.”

Betrayed! By whom? It didn’t matter. But now Valerie understood why Galway and St. Michael were here; they had come to finish the job their minions had started, there could be no doubt about that. Like the startled deer she was, Valerie rose and ran.

Downhill, fleet as the wind. Hoping Rosita wasn’t her betrayer, hoping none of the Indians she had come to like and admire in the last nine days had done this terrible thing, Valerie scrambled down the back side of the non-temple. Nervously missing her footing here and there, she hurried on, fright bringing bile to her throat.

The huts were ahead. There was no help now, not even from the villagers, who were somehow or other in Kirby Galway’s thrall. Every man’s hand, it seemed, was turned against Valerie Greene, yes, and every woman’s too, and probably most of the children.

The village was deserted. There was no place to hide, no sense trying to stay. The prospect of wandering in the wilderness once more was daunting, but not as daunting as the inexorable approach of Kirby Galway and Innocent St. Michael. She had to run for it; that’s all she could do.

Rosita had been making tortillas outside her hut, now cooling on a flat stone. Grabbing them up — who knew when she’d find food again — Valerie tucked them inside her repaired blouse, leaped the little stream, and plunged into the woods.

12 It Happened One Afternoon

Innocent sat on a flat stone, catching his breath. All about him, the Indians were in fevered motion, running in and out of huts, splashing through the stream, yelling at one another, slapping their children, kicking their dogs. Kirby Galway paced back and forth like a pirate captain on his bridge, shouting orders, barking commands, pointing this way and that, and being mostly ignored. The two men and one woman in the village who spoke English stood in the middle of it all arguing at the tops of their voices, though not in English, so it didn’t help.

Long before the finish, Innocent knew how it would end. The question was, when it happened would he believe it?

On the other hand, what was there at all to believe about this day? Himself, to begin with, he found utterly incredible. He had committed — or had attempted to commit — physical violence. He, Innocent St. Michael, a man who had always prided himself on his subtlety, a man who let his brains do his fighting and let his money hire what physical labor had to be done. He had committed — or had attempted to commit — a major felony, and not for personal profit. He had committed — or had attempted to commit — a crime of passion! Him! Innocent St. Michael! Passion!

Attempted; attempted; attempted; hadn’t even done the job right. Ten times he had fired at Kirby Galway and ten times he had missed. Well, nine and a half. One little scratch on the shoulder that Kirby carried on about as though he’d been crippled for life, before finally calming down and swearing all over again that he had absolutely, positively not killed Valerie Greene.

There were reasons at least to believe that last part, which Kirby had elucidated for him in several repetitive shouted sentences. First, if he had murdered Valerie Greene and Innocent had found him out, there was absolutely no reason why he shouldn’t now go ahead and murder Innocent as well. Second, even if he’d had time to plot a murder with Innocent’s driver, the fellow was still Innocent’s driver and Kirby would have been crazy to trust him with such a dangerous request. And third, Kirby now believed that Valerie Greene wasn’t dead after all but was living in an Indian village under the name Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.

So hither they had come, hope and skepticism fighting in Innocent’s breast, to be surrounded by bright-eyed curious villagers, to be assured that yes, Sheena was living with them, she was right over the hill there — Kirby’s hill, Innocent had noted, wondering if it meant anything — and on to the village they had come, for the onset of pandemonium. Once the running and shouting and general disarray started Innocent had merely sat down on a flat stone outside one of the huts to catch his breath, knowing how it would end and wondering if he would believe it when it happened.

Which at last it did. The village had grown quieter, and here was Kirby standing spraddle-legged before him, the very icon of frustrated generalship. “She’s gone,” he said.

Innocent looked up at him; he had mostly regained his breath by now. “The question is,” he said, “do I believe it?”

Kirby looked exasperated to the point of violence. “And just when, goddam it,” he said, “was I supposed to have set up this one?”

“Your gun-toting pal Manny,” Innocent suggested. “He has a radio there at that house. He got on it as soon as we took off, he called here—”

“There’s no radio here,” Kirby said, and waved his arms extravagantly. “Search the goddam place yourself, Innocent. We never put a radio in because we didn’t want to attract attention.”

A fact — if it was a fact — that Innocent stowed away in his brain for later consideration. “There are other radios in this world,” he said. “Perhaps only half a mile from here, some friend of yours. Manny called him, told him to pass on the story he’d heard you tell me, about the white woman living in an Indian village, and the villagers calling her Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, and— Kirby, many people would not believe that story.”

“They’d all be wrong,” Kirby said.

“Let me ask you something,” Innocent said. “You were here the day before yesterday, they told you about Sheena living with them in their village, and you didn’t go look at her.”

“I didn’t believe it,” Kirby said.

“So why should I?”

“Because I saw a white woman after, when I flew over. I told you that, Innocent. I wasn’t sure then, but now you tell me Valerie Greene disappeared, and the degenerate you gave her to has skipped the country, and—”

“All right, Kirby, all right.” Innocent felt very tired, rather sad, oddly ineffectual. “But all at once she’s gone. She was here, but not now. Why?”

“She don’t trust you,” the English-speaking Indian — Rosita — said, suddenly with them, pointing a sharp-boned finger at Kirby. “She told me all about how you cheated Wintrop Cartwright.”

Kirby blinked. “Who?”

“The man she was gonna marry,” Rosita said.

Innocent lifted his head at that, and looked at this sharp-featured skinny girl. “She was going to marry someone?”

“Wintrop Cartwright.” Rosita smiled at Innocent, apparently finding something pleasing there. “He’s a rich man like her papa, but old. That’s why she run away. She’s a pilot, you know.”

Innocent shook his head. “This is ridiculous,” he told Kirby. “If the woman does exist, she’s the wrong woman.”

“Wait a minute,” Kirby said, and turned to Rosita. “Listen,” he said, “you people just called her Sheena as a nickname, right?”

“It was Tommy’s idea,” she said. “He’s the reader.”

“So what was her real name?”

Rosita thought a second: “Valerie.”

Innocent looked at her, trying to see inside that narrow head.

Kirby said, “What was her last name?”

“How do I know? I just called her Sheena. She liked it.”

“But her real name,” Kirby insisted, “was Valerie.”

“And she told me all about you,” Rosita said. “How you don’t really have no crazy wife in an asylum anywheres, you’re just taking advantage of me.”

Innocent frowned deeply at this new development. “A crazy wife? What crazy wife?”

“Never mind,” Kirby said hastily. “The point is, Innocent, her name is Valerie, and she took off either because she’s afraid of you or she’s afraid of me. Any case, she saw us coming.”

“She has no reason to be afraid of me,” Innocent said.

Rosita said, “Maybe she thought you were here to take her back to her papa, make her marry Wintrop.”

Kirby said, “Wait a second, light is beginning to dawn. Valerie was on the run — probably from that driver of yours, Innocent — and she was afraid to tell the truth, didn’t know who she could trust, so she told these clowns the old runaway heiress plot, and they bought it.”

“That’s just what she is!” Rosita said, happy to confirm the truth. “She didn’t want to marry that Wintrop, so she got in her plane and flew away, but then she got in a storm and crashed in the Maya Mountains over there and walked and walked and walked for days and then we found her. And she made us swear we wouldn’t tell, and then she told us the truth.”

“The truth,” Kirby said. “The runaway heiress story.”

“Too many stories going around,” Innocent said.

Rosita looked off westward, toward the blue-shouldered Maya Mountains. “We’ll find her pretty soon, I think,” she said.

Innocent sat up straighten “You do? Why’s that?”

“Stand up a second,” she told him.

Innocent frowned at Kirby, who shrugged. So Innocent shrugged, and stood up, and Rosita looked at the flat stone where he’d been sitting and said, “Yeah, they’re gone.”

Innocent looked at the flat stone, at Kirby, and at Rosita. He said, “May I sit down?”

“Sure.”

“What’s gone?” Kirby said.

“Sheena’s got this throat problem or lungs or something,” Rosita explained, “so she can’t smoke, so if we turn on sometimes she can’t join in, you know?”

“And?” said Kirby, while Innocent reflected that for Kirby a crazy wife would be redundant.

Rosita said, “So I promised I’d make her some pot tortillas, but I never got around to it till today. They’re pretty strong, you know.”

“You made pot tortillas today?” Kirby asked.

“Yeah, and put them on that rock and now they’re gone. Sheena must of took them.” Rosita looked westward again, toward where the shadows lengthened on the steep faces of the mountains. “She won’t get very far,” she said.

13 Some Aspects of Pharmacological Experience

“Vaaaallll-erie! Oh, Vaaaallll-erie!”

“Sing,” Valerie sang, under her breath, beneath her breath, down among the mushrooms of her mind. “Sing to me, and sing to me, and then I’ll run away. Oop!”

Down again. Another scratch on the same knee. Not treating this model well at all, take it into the shop they’ll say, Jeepers, lady, where you been driving this model? Mountaintops and bellyflops, a poor white convertible upside down with its whitewalls spinning, upholstery all muddy, scratches on the fenders, this is a dent, lady.

“Vaaaallll-erie! It’s Ro-zeee-ta! It’s oh-kaaaayyyy!”

“Vrrooommm,” Valerie said, giggling at the idea of having the idea of being a car, and from somewhere above and behind her left shoulder she watched herself go up the jungly slope on all fours. Mud, dirt, roots, dangling branches. Little buggies scuttling out of the way of her Donald Duck hands. Wflap! Wflap! Big webbed hands out of the sky.

Still light in the sky, dark blue light, sun gone away to the other side of the mountain, waiting over there for Valerie. Vaaaallll-erie, I’m waiting. Here I come, here I come, here I come.

Ridge. Downslope. Climb a tree trunk to verticality, vertiginous verticality, the ground darker than the sky, her feet way far down there in the pool of darkness, puddles of night all around her feet. The calling voices were fainter, but could still be heard, the beacon behind her that gave her direction. Keep the voices between her shoulder-blades, hurry the opposite way.

Splop. Splash-splop. Stream; water. Chuckles down from the right, scurries on off to the left, white rabbits down the hideyhole. Follow? No, go the other way. Where’d those rabbits come from? Hide with Mister Rabbit at home.

Splush, splush, splush. Water cold and nice on the cuts, running around her shins, ribbons in a wind tunnel. Stop a minute, kneel in the water, get her hands and arms all clean, throw water on her heated face. Sssss, steam from her heated face — just kidding. Stones on the bottom of the stream, though, that’s no joke. Up again, up up up up up. On.

Siiiiii-lence. Oh, siiiiii-lence. How long has it been? Very very dark. No stream, no light. Reach out and touch a telephone pole. Step. Reach out; step.

Are there stars out tonight? Oh, gosh, oh-oh, don’t look up, it’s awfully dizzy up there!

Hungry all the time for some reason. Must be all this exercise. Pig out. Only three tortillas left between her blouse and her flesh, beneath her breasts. Munch and munch. A little dry and tough, but tasty. Satisfying.

A path. Yes? Yes. A narrow path angling downward, slightly to the left. Pitch black, can’t see your face in front of your head. Walk down the path, swing the arms, the last two tortillas stuck to her skin.

Ow! Tripped right over that log, fell on a man! A man? Roll away — not with me you don’t, buster!

Flashlights came on, men’s voices, they’d been asleep or resting or what, Valerie gaped around at them, her little pinprick eyes staring in the flashlights, seeing the camouflage uniforms on the chunky little bodies, the weapons, the bush hats. Soldiers, British, Gurkhas. Gurkha patrol, is that a song? “Rescued!” Valerie said in cheerful surprise, and smiled happily, and her eyes rolled back in her head.

14 Same Again All Around

For a moment after he switched off the van’s engine, Vernon sat on in darkness, staring at the wall of the Fort George Hotel directly in front of himself and willing himself to be calm. He was going to do this, he was going to come out the other side, it was all going to be all right. All of it. All right. The chicken and rice he’d eaten for dinner at J.B.’s on the way down from Belmopan sat like an auto accident in his stomach, unmoving.

If only the village had not already been selected — the one the journalists would be visiting tomorrow. Vernon had done his best, but he’d been too late. The village had been selected, and it was not the one the Colonel had insisted the journalists must see.

What choice had he had? He was racing across a tightrope, high above the rocks with no net, already off balance, running forward as fast as he could because it was the only way not to fall. The other side, the other side, sooner or later he had to reach the other side. In the meantime, he could only keep running, keep improvising, try not to miss his step.

The wrong village. With great difficulty Vernon had arranged to be made the driver for tomorrow’s expedition. Then, using the absent Innocent St. Michael’s authority, he had also arranged to be ordered to come to Belize City tonight, ahead of time, staying at the Fort George along with the journalists, ostensibly so they could begin early tomorrow morning but actually so that Vernon would be beyond any countermanding orders. He would be the driver, and that’s all.

And he would make a mistake. An honest mistake. He would take the journalists to a different village, not the one the government had selected but very similar. A simple mistake that anyone might make. And then it would all be over, he would have reached the other side of the abyss, no more tightrope, firm ground at last.

Vernon whimpered, a little mewling sound. Behind him, the dozen empty seats of the van were filled with the ghosts of wrong turnings. He shuddered, and took the key from the ignition and his overnight bag from the floor space between the front seats, and got out onto the blacktop.

The desk clerk was both cold and obsequious; obsequious because Vernon’s room was being paid for by a government department, suggesting power and authority, and cold because Vernon himself was so clearly nothing but a minor clerk. When I’m rich, Vernon thought, but this time the thought wouldn’t complete itself. Where was his rage? Sighing, he filled out the registration form, then showed his list to the desk clerk, saying, “These are journalists staying here, I must see them in the morning, you’ll—”

“I believe they are in the bar,” the desk clerk said, coldly and obsequiously.

So Vernon went to his room and unpacked, and went to the bathroom, and washed his hands and face and the back of his neck, and went to the bathroom, and took some antacid pills, and went to the bathroom, and changed his shirt, and combed his hair, and went to the bathroom, and washed his face, and turned out the light, and went down to the bar, where two of the large round black formica tables were occupied. The four silent gloomy beer-drinking fellows at one table with their big red faces and big red knees jutting from both ends of their short-trousered British Army uniforms were certainly not journalists, whereas the seven oddly assorted people clustered around the other table, all talking at once, nobody listening, certainly were. Vernon went over and stood beside that group, waiting for a simultaneous pause in all seven monologues, or for someone to notice him.

Someone noticed him; a skinny sharp-nosed gray-faced man in a safari shirt and bush jacket and U.S. Army fatigue trousers and Hush Puppies, who looked up, saw Vernon, and in an East London accent said, “Right. Same again all round, then.”

“I’m not a waiter,” Vernon said.

“No? Then be off with you.” The man turned back to his chattering companions.

“I’m your driver,” Vernon said.

“The hell you say.” The man looked him up and down. “And where am I going, then?”

“Requena,” Vernon said. The settlement was called that because it was the last name of the majority of the settlers.

“That’s tomorrow,” the man said. By now, two of the others, including the group’s lone woman, had also stopped talking and were looking at Vernon, wondering what entertainment or news value he might possess.

“I am here tonight,” Vernon told them. “I am introducing myself, and I will spend the night in the hotel, so we can get an early start tomorrow.”

“Well, good fellow!” the sharp-nosed man said. “Johnny on the spot, that’s the ticket. Introducing yourself, are you?”

“My name is Vernon.”

“And how do you do, Vernon? You’ll find that I am Scottie. This ravishing lady to my left is Morgan Lassiter, a world-class lesbian and ace repor—”

“Just because you never got any,” Morgan Lassiter told him, but calmly, as though she were used to him — or possibly to his type. Her accent was anonymously Midlantic, as though she’d learned English from machines, on Mars. She nodded in a businesslike way at Vernon and said, “Nice to see you.”

“And you, Ma’am.”

“This lot,” Scottie said, and interrupted himself to bang his whisky glass on the table, crying, “Shut up, you berks! Vernon’s here to introduce himself. And here he is, our driver, Vernon. Bright and early on the morrow he shall whisk us from this hellhole here out to the other hellhole over there, and then back again. Back again is included, am I right, Vernon?”

“Yes,” said Vernon.

Scottie gestured this way and that. “Over there is Tom, a fine American photojournalist, just chockablock with all the latest American photo journalist technological advances, isn’t that right, Tommy?”

“Fuck you in the ass,” Tommy said.

“Chahming,” Scottie said. “Next to him is Nigel, the dregs of humanity, not only an Australian but an Australian newspaperman, until he forgot himself once, told the truth, and was exiled to Edinburgh.”

“What Tommy said,” said Nigel.

“Never does his own research,” Scottie commented. “Here beside me we have Colin, the demon scribbler of Fleet Street, and beside him is Ralph Waldo Eckstein, who won’t tell anybody why the Wall Street Journal fired him, and—”

“What Tommy said.”

“Yes, yes. Now, Vernon, lad, you’ve probably been told we are a party of six, is that not right?”

“That’s right,” Vernon said.

“But here we are, as you can plainly see, a party of seven. Did Morgan give birth? Perish the thought. In fact, perish the little perisher. No, what has happened is that even here in this pit of nullity, this farthest outpost of Empire which Aldous Huxley quite rightly said was on the way from nowhere and to nowhere, journalists seek one another out, come together for comfort and liquor and the latest lies. That gentleman over there, with the truly wonderful moustache, is one Hiram Farley, an editor if you please with a most famous American magazine called Trash. No, I beg your pardon; Trend.”

Hiram Farley leaned forward with his meaty forearms crossed on the table and looked unsmilingly at Vernon. He said nothing. He seemed to be exploring Vernon’s eyes, looking for something, traces of something. A cold finger touched Vernon’s spine. He knows, he thought. But he can’t know, get hold of yourself. Vernon blinked.

Scottie said, “Mr. Farley would very much like to come along with us tomorrow, if he may. Busman’s holiday and all that, the old fire company horse hearing the bell. Please say yes.”

“Yes,” said Vernon.

15 Devil Dance

Twenty little devil-gods stood on the rattan mat, knees turned out to the sides and deeply bent, arms flung wide to show their bat webs, eyes glittering with evil, mouths stretched back in a violent smirk out of which forked tongues curled, poised to strike. In the flickering candlelight, the massed group of 20 demons seemed to move, shimmer, almost to dance, their eyes staring back at Kirby, who blinked, cleared his throat, and said, “Fine, Tommy. Very effective.”

“They get to you, don’t they?” Tommy held the candle lower, the movement causing the creatures to alter their knee bends and roll their eyes, while their shadows magnified and swooped on the far wall of the hut.

“They’re real good, Tommy,” Kirby said. Behind him, outside, a low-key party was under way, partly in hospitality at the presence of Kirby and Innocent and partly a vigil, waiting for word of Valerie Greene. Rosita and a couple of the others were still out there in the darkness somewhere, occasionally calling, but everyone knew they wouldn’t find their Jungle Queen tonight. At first light they’d look again, hoping nothing bad had happened to her, reeling around stoned and lost in the darkness.

Innocent was in another hut right now, being shown some of the blankets and dress material the villagers had made and dyed themselves, so Tommy had taken the opportunity to bring Kirby here and show him he’d actually been at work making the promised Zotzes.

Zotzilaha Chimalman, replicated 20 times, danced in the candle-light on the rattan mat. Each figure was about 10 inches high, seven inches wide, formed from clay, hollowed out as an incense burner. Buried and dug up again, all of them had been knocked together a bit to simulate age and rough treatment, each one subtly different, showing the specific touches of the half dozen artisans who had worked on them.

Fakes. Mockeries. Tiny clay imitations of an ancient long-dead superstition, but still brimming with the potency of dread. Zotzilaha Chimalman hated mankind and had the power and the genius to do something about it. Kirby had never been a Maya, but nevertheless he felt uneasy in the presence of this naked malevolence. He could understand why it was so hard for Tommy to turn his hand to the creation of such a being, and even more so for the other villagers, whose straightforward relationship with life and the spirits and their ancestors had never been corrupted by exile to the outer world.

Over the candle flame, Tommy’s eyes gleamed at Kirby almost as gleefully as the demons’: “Had enough, Kimosabe?”

“They’re fine, Tommy,” Kirby said, calm and dignified. “Thanks. And, uh, let’s get the hell out of here.”

Tommy chuckled, and they went outside to a clear night full of stars, with a moon about seven months pregnant. The villagers liked to party, but were troubled by the disappearance of their Sheena, and therefore merely sat in groups, murmuring together. The little plastic radio had been turned off; no salsa music from Guatemala tonight. A horizontal scrim of marijuana smoke hung at nose level. Jars of home-brew clinked against stone. The mountains that had swallowed Valerie Greene were black against the western sky.

Innocent was no longer admiring materials but sitting on them. A bulky old mahogany armchair had been brought out of one of the huts and set near the largest fire, then draped with colorful cloths; black-and-white zigzags over red or rust or orange, bright red and deep blue diamonds in alternating patterns, representations of flora and fauna so stylized by centuries of repetition as to have lost all hint of their original realistic nature. Upon this soft throne sat Innocent, smiling upon the fire and the shyly smiling villagers, in his left hand a large Hellman’s Mayonnaise jar mostly full of what to drink.

Crossing toward him, Kirby thought at first it was merely the ambiguity of the firelight that made Innocent’s face look so much softer and less guileful than usual, but when he got closer he saw it was more than that. “Innocent?” he said.

Innocent turned his smiling face. He wasn’t drunk, and he wasn’t participating in the gage that was being passed around. It seemed as though he was just, well, happy. “How are you, Kirby?” he said.

“I’m fine.” Kirby looked around for something to sit on, found nothing, and sat on the ground beside Innocent’s left knee, half turned away from the fire so he could continue the conversation. “How are you, Innocent?”

“I’m all right,” Innocent said, with a strange kind of dawdling emphasis. “I’ve had a very strange day, Kirby.”

Kirby ruefully touched his shoulder, where Innocent’s bullet had kissed him. “Haven’t we all,” he said. Around them, the Indians conducted their own conversations in their own language, nodding or smiling at Kirby and Innocent in hospitable incomprehension from time to time. Tommy and Luz were at some other fire, waiting for Rosita to give up and come home.

“This morning,” Innocent said, “I was in despair. Would you believe that, Kirby?”

“You seemed a little hot under the collar.”

“That, too. But it was mostly despair. When I got out of bed this morning, Kirby, I was prepared to throw my entire life away.”

“Not to mention mine.”

“Mine, Kirby,” Innocent insisted, but still with that same new languid manner. “I didn’t take my laps in the pool this morning,” he said. “Can you imagine that?”

“I guess not.”

“I never skip my laps in the pool. I didn’t eat breakfast. I didn’t eat lunch.”

“Okay,” Kirby said. “That’s a couple of things I can’t imagine.”

“It was love that did it to me, Kirby. At my age, after all these years, I fell in love.”

“With Valerie Greene?”

“Strange thing,” Innocent said, “until just now I couldn’t even use the word. Love. I could say I missed her, I was angry about her loss, I liked the idea of her, but I couldn’t use the word love. I could plan to shoot you because of it, but I couldn’t say it. Plan to throw my entire life away without ever saying that word.”

“My God, Innocent,” Kirby said, “you’ve had an epiphany.”

“Is that what it is? Feels pretty good.” Innocent smiled and sipped a bit from the jar.

“But,” Kirby said, hesitating, not wanting to spoil Innocent’s good mood or changed personality or whatever the hell this was, “but, Innocent, are you sure? I mean, how well did you know Valerie Greene?”

“How well do I have to know her? Kirby, if I knew her better, would it make me love her more?”

“It wouldn’t me,” Kirby said, remembering his own less than satisfactory last sight of Valerie Greene.

“I spent one afternoon with her,” Innocent said. “Just Platonic, you know.”

“You didn’t have to say that, Innocent,” Kirby said comfortably.

Innocent chuckled. “I suppose I didn’t. Anyway, I expected to see her again, and it didn’t happen. I was thirsty, and the water went away.”

“You’re a wonder, Innocent,” Kirby said. “I never knew you were a romantic.”

“I never was a romantic. Sitting here now, thinking about it, I think maybe that’s what was wrong. I was never a romantic, never once in my life. Do you know why I married my wife?”

“No.”

“Her father had the money I needed to buy a certain piece of land.”

“Come on, Innocent, there must have been more to it than that. There were other girls with fathers with money.”

“There were two other potential buyers for the land,” Innocent said. “I didn’t have time to fool around.”

“So why Valerie Greene?”

“Because,” Innocent said, “there was nothing in it for anybody concerned. She’s an honest girl, Kirby, she’s the most completely honest girl I ever met in my life. And smart. And earnest. And something more than just out for a good time. But the main thing is, no matter what she does, where she is, what’s going on, she’s always one hundred percent honest.”

“You know a lot about somebody you spent one afternoon with,” Kirby pointed out.

“I do, that’s right.” Innocent smiled, remembering something or other. “She wants to give happiness and receive happiness,” he said. “She’s not out to buy or sell anything. She doesn’t try to get an edge.”

“You’ve got it bad,” Kirby told him.

“I’ve got it good,” Innocent said. “And now that I believe you and these people here, now that I’m in this nowhere little nothing village and I know for sure Valerie’s out there, not far, not dead, now that I know she’s not dead, it’s just fine, isn’t it?”

“If you say so.”

“She’ll be back,” Innocent said. “Some time tomorrow she’ll be found, these eyes will look at her, this mouth will say, ‘Hello, Valerie.’” He beamed in anticipated pleasure.

“Innocent,” Kirby said, with wonder in his eyes and in his voice, “you’ve regained your innocence.”

Innocent pleasantly laughed. “I suppose I have. Never knew I had one to lose. Kirby, maybe this would have happened anyway, maybe it’s that man’s change of life thing, but it needed somebody good to bring it out, and that was Valerie. This is a whole new person you’re looking at, Kirby.”

“I believe you,” Kirby said.

“He was tucked away inside me all the time, I never knew it.”

“The love of a good woman, huh?”

“Go ahead and laugh, Kirby, that’s okay.”

“I’m not laughing, Innocent,” Kirby told him, in almost total sincerity. “I think it’s great. So this is the Innocent I’ll be seeing around Belize City from now on, is it?”

Innocent’s smile was sleepy, comfortable, self-confident. “I know better than that, Kirby,” he said.

“You mean it won’t last?”

Innocent said, “Kirby, did you ever visit someplace that was really nice, a place that made you happy, so you started to think maybe you’d like to just stay there forever?”

“Sure.”

“But then after a while you realize it isn’t your place, you don’t fit in except as a visitor, you don’t belong there and you never will. So you go home, where you do belong, and where you’re happy most of the time because it’s the right place where you ought to be.”

“Okay, Innocent.”

“From time to time,” Innocent said, “you remember that other place, and how nice it was to visit, but you don’t make the mistake of thinking you can go back and live there. So that’s what’s happening now, Kirby. I’m visiting some other me, a real nice me that I never knew before.” That lazy smile softened Innocent’s features once more. “But don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ll go home to the real me when the time comes.”

“In that case,” Kirby said, now completely sincere, “I’m glad I was here to meet the other fella.”

16 Pillow Talk

Voices. Murmuring voices.

Valerie opened her right eye and followed the progress of an ant as it tottered along the dark damp ground, carrying a big piece of chewed-off leaf above itself like a green sail. Her left cheek was pressed against that ground, so her left eye remained closed, while her right eye tracked the ant and her right ear received the input of those murmuring voices without attempting to decipher.

Mouth: dry. Body: extremely stiff. Head: painful. Knees: stinging. Hair: matted. Brain: semiconscious.

Her right arm was bent up at some little distance from her face, lying on the ground, leaving a miniature arena in which that ant-sail bobbed as though on a dark brown lake. Valerie watched the pale green triangle until it reached her thumb, reversed, turned right, reached the knuckle at the base of her thumb, reversed, turned left, and carried on out of sight, into the great large ocean of the world.

Human beings — much larger than ants — went by. Valerie’s working eye swiveled upward, sighted over her hulking shoulder, and glimpsed the two men moving away, talking. Camouflage uniforms. Curved knives in black leather sheaths at their waists. Gurkhas.

It was coming back, slowly and erratically. The eye swivel had been unexpectedly painful, so Valerie shut the lid, retired into darkness, and permitted memory to work its will upon her.

Indian village. Airplane with Kirby Galway and Innocent St. Michael. Flight, with tortillas. Great confusion as darkness settled, her mind adrift — what had that all been about? Had terror unhinged her? But she didn’t remember feeling that frightened, certainly not after she’d gotten some distance from the village. She’d even paused beside a stream, she remembered, sitting there a few minutes to catch her breath and drink water to wash down her first tortilla. After that...

After that, wandering in darkness, much of it mere confused imagery in her mind. Had she been laughing uproariously, pretending to be an automobile, talking out loud like Donald Duck? Surely memory was wrong. Or had there been something in the stream? “Don’t drink the water,” isn’t that what they say?

But then— Rescue! A Gurkha patrol, bivouacked for the night, and she had literally fallen among them. So now, after all the perils and dangers of the last weeks, finally she was safe, amid her rescuers, whose murmuring voices were all around her. Not speaking English, of course. What would it be? Something Asian. Nepalese, was that right, for people from Nepal?

“... kill...”

Weariness spread through her body, a kind of outflowing unconsciousness, padding all around her aches and sores, moving toward her brain.

“... attack the village...”

Awake too early, wrong to be conscious before her body had knit up its wounds. Soothing, soothing sleep. The darkness flowed.

“... take no prisoners...”

Strange. Understanding their words, but not in English. She’d never understood Napalese before.

“... kill them all...”

Valerie’s right eye shot open. Kekchi! She could understand them because they were speaking Kekchi! Not the dialect she’d originally learned, nor the somewhat muddier version they spoke back in South Abilene, but some other sharper version, more guttural and glottal, but comprehensible nevertheless.

Why would Gurkha soldiers speak Kekchi to one another?

“When do we kill the woman?”

Valerie’s entire body clenched. Her open eye stared at her wrist, her ear dilated.

“When we get there.”

A slight unclenching, but eye and ear both still wide.

“Why not shoot her now? She’ll slow us down.”

“No shooting. What if somebody hears and comes to look?”

“I could cut her with this knife.”

“And if she screams?”

(Oh, I’d scream, yes, I would.)

“I know you. You’re just in such a hurry to kill her because she scared you so much last night.”

“Me? Who had to change his pants? Was that me, or was that you?”

“Yeah, I thought you were gonna drop dead, you were so scared. You thought a real old-time devil came to get you.”

“I didn’t go run and hide in the woods like some people.”

They discussed this further, bristling a bit, each accusing the other of being more superstitious, more prey to fears connected with the old Mayan gods and devils, while Valerie lay silent and unmoving, taking little pleasure in the irony: They had been afraid of her.

Then at last they got back to it, one of them saying, “So what do we do about the woman?”

“She thinks we’re Gurkhas, taking her back to camp. So she’ll come along, no trouble. When we get to the village, we gag her, wait till the people come out from the city. When we shoot the villagers, we shoot her, too.”

“What about the people from the city?”

“We kill the driver. We wound one white man, it doesn’t matter which one.”

“Why don’t we kill them all?”

“Because they’re the people who write the stories.” (There is no word for reporter in Kekchi.) “When they go home, they’ll write all about how the Gurkhas killed all the people in the village.”

“Then we go back across the border?”

“And the Colonel gives us our money.”

Valerie continued to lie there, feigning sleep, while the false Gurkhas continued to talk. They discussed for some time whether to rape her, finally deciding not to do so yet but wait till they got to the village and then play it by ear. (The idioms are somewhat different in Kekchi.) Then one of them said something about how they should get started soon, the village was a good hour’s hike north of here, and Valerie decided it was time to wake up. She made a moaning sound, stretched, rolled over, sat up, looked around wide-eyed at the group of men seated and standing all about her, and said, “Oh, my gosh!”

They looked at her. One of them said, in Kekchi, “Smile at her. Show her we’re friendly.”

A cluster of ghastly smiles were beamed her way. Valerie smiled back and said, “You rescued me!” Her performance was based on Judy Garland in “The Wizard of Oz”.

They nodded and smiled. Apparently, none of them spoke English.

With some difficulty, Valerie struggled to her feet. The dozen men watched her, smiles still pasted on their faces. Looking around, she said, “Where can I wash up?”

“What does she want?”

“Food, maybe.”

Valerie made hand-washing gestures and face-washing gestures.

“She wants the stream.”

“She wants to piss and wash her face.”

Three or four of them pointed past some trees at the edge of the clearing.

“Oh, thanks,” Valerie said, her own ghastly smile still firmly in place, and turned away.

“I say we definitely rape her.”

“Not before we get to the village.”

Valerie paused at the first trees to look back, smiling and wagging her finger. “Don’t peek now,” she said.

17 The Secret Road

Vernon couldn’t eat. He pushed the fruit around in the bowl and looked gloomily at the coffee, while over at another table the seven journalists wolfed down everything in sight, Scottie going so far as to pretend to bite the waitress’s arm. She offered him a professional smile, refilled his coffee cup, and came over to ask Vernon if everything was all right.

“Fine,” Vernon said.

Vernon was at a small table to one side of the large dining room at the Fort George, with the ravenous correspondents in front of him and the view of the timeless sea beneath a timeless sun off to his right. (The black freighter still stood at anchor in the offing, the paperwork on its eventual auction suffering the usual timeless bureaucratic delay.)

What is going to happen in the village?

I didn’t ask that question, Vernon told himself. I don’t want to know the answer. I only want to survive to the other end of the tightrope. I don’t want to know what links together the Colonel’s various demands of me.

Refugee settlements.

Photos of Gurkhas.

The refugees flee Guatemala, flee the Colonel and the government he serves. They become lost to the Colonel, protected by borders, by international law, by the British, by the wandering Gurkha patrols. The refugees come to trust the Gurkhas, short dark men who come from so far away but who look so like themselves. British intelligence in this part of the world is excellent, mostly because the refugees and the other Indians will tell things to the Gurkhas that they won’t tell any normal Brit. (When, in 1979, Guatemala started a secret road westward through the jungle into southern Belize, it was the Indians who told the Gurkhas, and the Gurkhas who advanced through the jungle and stopped the road.) Faith and trust in the Gurkhas emboldens the refugees, protects the refugees, swells the tide of refugees, and at the same time increases the embarrassment and frustration of the government the Colonel serves.

The journalists at last had finished their breakfasts, were rising. Vernon put a piece of papaya in his mouth, but couldn’t chew it. The fruit was cool at first, but warmed slowly in his mouth.

The correspondents streamed by, talking at one another. The American photojournalist named Tom stopped to say, “Give us ten minutes and we’ll be ready.”

“Mm,” Vernon said, nodding his head with the papaya in it.

“Your vehicle’s out front?”

“Mm.” More nodding.

“See you there.”

“Mm.”

Scottie went by with the extra man, the editor from Trend named Hiram Farley. Scottie was saying, “Tell me now, Hiram, old son, we’ve known each other all these many hours, what do you think of me, eh? Eh?”

Farley, with a judicious expression, said, “I would describe you as tiresomely witty.”

“By God, that’s succinct! Don’t pay by the word over on Trend, I’ll bet!” Scottie said, and clapped Farley on the back with a sound like a gunshot. Vernon blinked, and swallowed his papaya.

18 The Harmonica Player

The letter read:

“A very dry Tanqueray Gibson on the rocks, please,” Gerry said.

“Gerry,” Alan said warningly.

“Just one,” Gerry said.

The stewardess said, “I think the only gin we have is Gordon’s.”

“Oh, well,” Gerry said. “All right, I suppose.”

“So that’s one martini,” the stewardess said.

“Gibson.”

“The onions didn’t come aboard this trip.”

“Oh, well. All right, I suppose.” Sadly, Gerry turned away and gazed out at cloudtops; they looked dirty.

“Sir?” the stew said, turning her acrylic attention on Alan, in the middle seat.

“The same,” Alan said. “Whatever it was.”

With a thin smile, the stew turned to the curator from Duluth, Whitman Lemuel, in the aisle seat: “Sir?”

“A Bloody Mary.”

The stew beamed her appreciation at a man who understood airline drinking, and turned away. Shortly she turned back, the tray tables were lowered to a position just above knees, drinks were exchanged for cash, and they were left in peace, each in his own narrow pocket in the egg carton flying them Floridaward.

Lemuel raised his glass of red foulness: “Confusion to our enemies.”

“Oh, my, yes,” said Gerry.

“I’ll drink to that,” said Alan, and they did, and Alan made a face. “Swill,” he said.

“Better than nothing,” Gerry told him, and took another tiny sip of his own drink.

The truth was — and Gerry would go to his grave without revealing this to anyone — the truth was, Gerry had no real sensitivity to the tastes of alcohol. If something were really very sweet, like Kahlua, or very bitter, like Campari, he could tell the difference, but in the range of gin drinks and vodka drinks and all of that he was very little aware of distinctions of taste, so this prepackaged martini here with the defrosted pimento olive was about the same to him as the finest ever Tanqueray Gibson on the rocks which a superb Upper East Side bartender would have prepared without even slightly bruising the gin. But one was expected to know the right things to drink, and appreciate them, and so on, and one of the ways to show that sort of sophistication was to say, “A very dry Tanqueray Gibson on the rocks, please,” so that’s what Gerry said whenever the subject came up, and everything worked out fine.

He wondered sometimes if Alan really knew or cared about the distinctions in booze. Impossible to ask, of course.

As for Whitman Lemuel and his Bloody Mary, there must be something so liberating about being a provincial, not having to keep up a front of sophistication.

What an odd alliance theirs was, after all. Brought together inadvertently by Kirby Galway, they’d had just scads of lies and deliberate confusions to clear out of the way before they could begin to understand one another, but then they’d realized at once what a golden opportunity lay before them. From what Lemuel had said about his encounter with the apparently quite frightening Innocent St. Michael, it wasn’t Galway after all who’d stolen the tapes, so they were probably safe in going ahead with the original arrangements. As for the legality, morality, all that, Lemuel had explained to them at passionate length that it was practically their duty to buy Kirby Galway’s loot and see it got proper homes in the United States among people of refinement and taste, people who could appreciate and preserve such irreplaceable treasures.

Much better than playing Woodward and Bernstein for Hiram. And more profitable, too.

Gerry had been rather surprised and thoroughly delighted when the conversation with Lemuel had shown that Alan also was more than ready to forget Trend and actually deal with Galway.

But cautiously, cautiously. That Galway had been engaging to deal with both of them, behind one another’s backs, and undoubtedly planned later to use each other’s existence to create a bidding situation for the more valuable pieces, showed the sort of slippery customer he was, as if they needed any further proof. Besides which, there was surely still more to the goings-on in Belize than any of them knew. Who could guess what intricacies, what wheels within wheels, might exist even further below the surface?

That was why they’d left that letter for Hiram; in case there was any trouble at all with the law — an idea that made Gerry’s heart flutter in his breast — the letter and the cable would prove that Gerry and Alan had had no intention of actually becoming accomplices of smugglers. On the other hand, if everything went well, Lemuel would take away the first shipment from Galway, Alan and Gerry would arrange to pick up the second shipment and then return to New York, and when they next saw Hiram they would tell him Galway had never shown up and they’d decided to abandon the whole project.

How oddly things worked out. But that, Gerry thought with some self-satisfaction as he sipped his premixed Gordon’s martini, is another mark of sophistication: the ability to deal with truly complex patterns, whether in art or in life. A simpler person like Whitman Lemuel, for instance, no matter how dedicated he might be to the preservation of pre-Columbian artifacts, was still essentially—

A man walked down the aisle. He was about 40, not very tall but barrel-bodied and bull-necked, his large head stubbled with a gray crewcut, his face mean and disgruntled-looking, with down-turned thick lips and cold piggy eyes. A brown string tie hung down on a yellow shirt tight across his chest. He was so muscular he seemed to have trouble walking, his thick shoulders working massively back and forth. His tan jacket was too small for him, hanging open, with strain creases around the armpits.

What made Gerry notice this creature was that he was staring at Gerry. He looked mean and angry, as though something about Gerry just simply enraged him. Helpless to look away, Gerry sat open-mouthed and watched the man go by, their eyes locked as though with Krazy Glue. Gerry’s head turned like a ventriloquist’s dummy until at last the man removed his own glare to face forward, and as Gerry looked to his left, over Alan’s head, still compulsively staring, that open jacket swung out and back and something glinted inside it at chest level, and then the man was gone.

Something glinted.

A badge.

A policeman.

They know.

“Ohh,” said Gerry faintly.

Alan gave him a look: “What now?”

“I’m going—” Gerry swallowed loudly “—to be sick.”

Alan glared. Sotto voce, he hissed, “I can’t take you anywhere.”

“I don’t want to go anywhere. I want to be home.”

The man went by again, in the opposite direction, giving Gerry one withering glance before continuing on, his jacket taut across his back.

“You had to sit by the window,” Alan said. Turning away, jawline eloquent with rejection, he icily explained to Whitman Lemuel that they would all have to get up so Gerry could be sick.

“Ho—” Gerry said. “Unk— Ho-ome.”

Still, everything might have been all right if the lavatories hadn’t all been occupied.

19 The Role of the Anti-Hero in Postwar American Fiction

Kirby spent a few minutes watching the Indians wrap Zotzes in Beacons and then went back outside to a sunny day and a stormy Innocent, who rose from his mahogany throne to say, “Well, Kirby?”

“Well, what?”

“Aren’t you ready yet to give it up?”

Kirby frowned at him. “Give what up?”

“I don’t see any Valerie, you know.” Innocent put his hands on his ample hips and gazed around at the timeless morning scene: Indians squatting over fires in front of their huts, nursing their hangovers. Rosita’s distant unremitting call of “Vaaaallll-erie,” sounded from time to time across the sunny clean air like the cry of some local bird.

“They’ll find her,” Kirby said, somewhat impatiently. Last night’s Innocent had been a lot easier to get along with.

“It’s almost noon,” Innocent said. “She won’t be back, and we both know it. Stop the playacting, Kirby.”

“You believed me last night, Innocent, you said so yourself.”

“I talked a lot of nonsense last night.”

“You had an epiphany.”

“I believe what I had,” Innocent said, “was the shortest nervous breakdown on record. The disappearance of a fine young woman looked like what caused it, but it was really brought on by overwork, male meno-whatever-it-is—”

“Pause.”

“That’s my problem, I never did. Just work work work, I thought I was tough enough to go on forever.” He looked angry when he said all this, and Kirby was gradually coming to the realization that Innocent was partly angry at himself.

But not entirely; there was plenty left for Kirby. Glowering at him, Innocent said, “And smart fellas like you, Kirby, coming along all the time, looking for that edge, trying to put something over on me.”

Betraying a bit of his grudge, Kirby said, “The way I put over that land deal on you, right?”

“What have you been doing with that land, Kirby?” Innocent stared at him round-eyed, leaning forward, alive with curiosity and frustration. “That’s what caused this whole thing! That land up there—” he flung his hand toward the barren hill in question, just visible from the village “—isn’t worth shit, Kirby!”

“That’s not the way you talked when you sold it to me.”

“What are you doing with it? What is all this goddam temple about?”

Kirby took a step back, head cocked, giving Innocent a wary look. “Temple, Innocent? Which temple is that?”

“That’s what I want to know, dammit! You bring all these Americans down, give them some song and dance about a temple, there isn’t any temple!”

“That’s right.”

“Valerie comes down, comes to me, Kirby, says she has computers up in New York tell her there’s a temple on your land. Wants to go out to see it. That’s where it all starts, Kirby. I wanted to know what you were up to.”

“So you sent Valerie Greene out to see.”

“She was coming anyway, that isn’t the point.”

“No,” Kirby said, seeing it. “The point is, you made that creep of yours her driver.”

“I regret that, Kirby,” Innocent said. “I regret it bitterly. But I blame you as much as me.”

“What? You turned that girl oyer to that hoodlum, and it’s my fault?”

“I had to know what was going on,” Innocent said. “What you were up to. That was the only driver I could trust.”

“Some trust.”

“Kirby,” Innocent said, coming a step closer, calming himself by an obvious effort of will. “It’s time to tell the truth, Kirby,” he said. “Go ahead.”

“Time for you. I know you didn’t kill Valerie Greene, just as surely as I know poor Valerie is dead. I know my own driver killed her and then ran away, so you don’t have to put on this game any more.”

“No game, Innocent,” Kirby said, trying to look sincere. “Honest.”

“Don’t use words you don’t understand, Kirby. I’m not even mad at you any more. All you have to do is give up all the playacting, admit this is just one more of your cons, and we can go home.”

“But it isn’t. Valerie Greene actually was here, but now she’s gone.”

“If I know anything for certain in all of this, Kirby,” Innocent said, “it is that you’re lying.”

Kirby paused, thought things over, and then said, “All right, Innocent, I have a deal for you.”

Innocent’s agitated face suddenly cleared, as though a storm over a pond had gone, leaving the surface smooth and blank. Even his eyes showed nothing as he said, “A deal, Kirby? What sort of deal?”

“Buy that land back,” Kirby said.

“Why?”

“Buy it back for exactly what I paid you, and I’ll tell you the full honest truth about Valerie Greene and the temple.”

“Lava Sxir Yt.”

“Oh, you know its name, do you?” Kirby said, and smiled his admiration.

Very faintly Innocent frowned. “That’s not a deal,” he decided.

“It is if we shake on it.”

Innocent considered. He glanced over at the blighted hilltop. He studied Kirby. He said, “The truth, Kirby? How much of the truth?”

“I’ll answer every question you ask, as long as you keep asking.”

“Then I’ll have the land and your con, whatever it is, and the truth about Valerie.”

“That’s right.”

Again Innocent considered. “There were some expenses involved in the land transfer,” he said.

“You eat them.”

“Hmmm.” Innocent brooded, and then faintly smiled. “I’ll never know what the trick is until I say yes, will I?”

“It’s up to you, Innocent.” Kirby maintained a poker face, tried not to even think about anything. The instant Innocent had mentioned the temple, Kirby had known the scam was doomed, it was about to become necessary to move on to something else. But here was a way to get out of it whole, get his money back and get rid of that scabrous hill, trade it all for a live girl and a dead racket. Not bad. Only don’t think about it yet, don’t let it cross your mind. It wouldn’t surprise Kirby if Innocent were telepathic.

At last Innocent nodded. “All right,” he said. “You have a deal.” He put his hand out.

“Fine.” Permitting himself only the tiniest of smiles, Kirby took Innocent’s hand and they both squeezed down hard to seal the pact.

“You!” cried a familiar voice.

They turned, hands separating, and watched Valerie Greene leap with unconscious grace across the stream and come running toward them. Flushed, out of breath, quite dirty, somewhat ripped and tom, hair a mare’s nest, she was rather astonishingly beautiful. Stopping in front of Kirby, chest heaving, hands on hips, she cried, “I know how bad you are, I know you’re a terrible person, but nevertheless you’re the only one I can turn to. Innocent people are going to be massacred, and you have to help!”

“Sure, lady,” Kirby said.

Valerie Greene turned to frown in bewilderment at Innocent. Still on his feet though sagging, open-mouthed, glassy-eyed, shallow of breath, he seemed to be doing a Raggedy Andy imitation. “What’s the matter with him?” she said.

“He just bought the farm,” Kirby told her.

20 Inside the Jungle the Land Is Rich

Inside the jungle the land is rich, almost black, fed over thousands of years of growth and decay, well- watered and fertilized. The lower slopes of the mountains are so lushly overgrown that a man with a machete is lucky to make five miles a day through its tangle, and each day the jungle grows in again behind him, so that a week or a month later he would still need his machete to follow his path back out.

The Espejo and Alpuche families had once lived in Chimaltenango Province, west of Guatemala City, but that became in the 70s one of the hottest areas of the revolution and the counterrevolution and the death squads and the army raids, so when the owner of the land where they sometimes harvested crops offered them a new life far to the east in the peaceful Peten, they accepted. They were sorry to leave their people and their land, but life was too frightening now in Chimaltenango, so they got on the trucks along with nearly a hundred other Quiché Indians, entire family groups, and drove for days over the rough roads, northeast above Guatemala City, through Salama and north through Coban into Peten Province, where they would live from now on.

None of them had ever had any formal schooling, but from time to time they had heard speeches on the radio about Belice, the province just to the east of the Peten. Belice was the Lost Province of Guatemala, stolen a long time ago by the British but some day to be recaptured by the brave young men of Guatemala. In the meantime, a state of not-quite-war existed between Belice and the rest of Guatemala, though the Indians imported from the west into the Peten were never actually aware of it.

The war they were aware of was the war they thought they’d left. The landowners had tried to get away from the revolution by moving into the underutilized and almost unpopulated Peten, a plateau of good plains land just waiting for the plow, but when they had imported workers from the west they’d imported the revolution as well. After a while, some of the Indians disappeared into the bush. Tourist buses heading up to the Mayan ruins at Tikal were attacked. Some Army jeeps were blown up and some soldiers ambushed and killed. Soon the death squads were roaming the area by night, as in Chimaltenango, savaging the innocent stay-at-homes since they couldn’t find the actual revolutionaries.

Within four years, it had all turned very bad for the Espejo and Alpuche families. There were so few of them to service the owner’s land that they were worked harder than at home. They were given no cash money, and less time than before to work their own plots of land for food. They were separated from the support systems of their families and their tribe. They were away from their ancestral land, on some alien land they didn’t know or understand. They were worse off than before they’d moved.

One day the owner made everybody come listen to a speech by an Army colonel who told them he intended to crush the revolution and slaughter every last revolutionary. He told them that if any of them were even suspected of aiding the revolutionaries they could expect no mercy. He told them to go on working for the owner, to never complain, to keep silent, and to do their duty and they would be safe. He told them that if any of them was thinking of running away to Belice they should forget it because they would be shot down and left in the jungle to rot if they tried it. Don’t even think about running away to Belice, he told them.

On a clouded night two weeks later the 27 members of the Espejo and Alpuche families, 12 males and 15 females ranging in age from 53 years to three months, left their two one-room clapboard shacks and turned their faces east.

A 27-year-old woman who had always been sickly died along the way. They buried her.

They ate fruit, nuts, berries, roots, flowers, sometimes fish, less often birds or iguana or coati-mundi. They moved from the Peten plain into the Maya Mountains, traveling as far as they could each day, always frightened and always exhausted. They had no idea when they would leave the Peten and be in Belice, so they just kept going. On the 24th day they found a road ahead of them, crossing from north to south. While the rest of the family waited, two of the young men — an 11-year-old Espejo and a nine-year-old Alpuche — made their way to the two-lane blacktop road and hid beside it. Soon a truck came by. Its license plate was black with white numbers preceded by a large A and along the bottom it said Belize. Both young men were illiterate, but the 11-year-old had seen “Belice” on maps and remembered it.

Three automobiles went by over the next half hour, all with license plates having black lettering on a white ground, starting with the letter C and with the word Belize along the bottom. The man and woman in the third automobile, well dressed and laughing together, were quite obviously black people, which was the final proof: in Guatemala, black people are not encouraged. The scouts went back and reported their conclusion: they were in Belice.

The families retreated a bit farther from the road, found a fairly level place in the jungle, and cleared a small patch of land. The trunks and branches and fronds they cleared away were used to make three huts. More land was cleared and the seeds they’d brought with them were planted: corn, yams, beans.

Four months after arrival they were a going village, 28 people strong, two of the women having made the trip pregnant. They were harvesting crops, they were hunting successfully. Having found a few similar tiny settlements around them in the jungle, they had done some trading and now had two piglets, one male and one female, which were guarded with great care.

One day a pair of strangers came in from the road, bouncing in a Land Rover up the rough trail the people had made. They were a man and woman who spoke a crisp kind of Spanish, hard to understand, and who said they were from the government of Belize. Seeing the fright this caused, they promised not to make any trouble, but said they had come only to find out if the people needed help in any way. No, the people said, they needed no help. Well, if they ever needed anything, the man and woman told them, medical help, for instance, anything like that, all they had to do was go out to the road, turn right, and about 11 miles south they would find a town with a police station. “The police don’t have guns, and they aren’t mad at you,” the woman said, smiling.

The people didn’t believe the man and woman, but on the other hand these strangers seemed to have no ulterior motive, so they smiled and nodded and thanked them for the information. The man and woman said the town also had a weekend market if they ever had excess produce to sell, and had a Roman Catholic church, if the villagers were interested. (They were.) And a school for the children. (Maybe later.)

Cautiously, after that, the people broadened their contacts with this new land. A few occasionally went to the Catholic church, though they weren’t yet ready to talk to the priest, who was nothing they’d ever seen before, being neither Indian nor black nor Spanish. A sale of yams in the market had produced cash; crumpled pale-green Belizean dollars with Queen Elizabeth II on them and frail-seeming Belizean coins, which they kept in a sack in one of the huts, not sure yet what to use them for.

The man and woman, in the meantime, having returned to the capital at Belmopan, had entered this new settlement of refugees onto a map. The two families by chance happening to be of equal strength there, the man and woman named the settlement Espejo-Alpuche.

21 Zotz

“Valerie,” Innocent said, “what do you expect us to do about it?”

The false Gurkhas, irritated and uneasy at the disappearance of the tall American woman, hacked their way northward through the jungle.

“There isn’t time to radio for help!” Valerie cried.

No one in the van noticed Vernon moaning and shaking his head and punching his thighs as he drove, because Scottie was telling a story involving female Siamese twins, an Israeli Nazi-hunter and a one-kilo package of. uncut cocaine in a box marked Baking Soda.

Kirby stood frowning westward, thinking hard, brooding at those tumbled dark mountains. “It’s worth a try,” he said.

The false Gurkhas came to a gravel road and boldly crossed it. A British Army jeep went by as they did so, bluish gray, and the two uniformed Brits inside it waved as they passed, the false Gurkhas waving back.

“Tell me what to do,” Valerie said.

Kirby said, “I need thin cloth, cotton, the thinner the better, and a lot of it.”

Tom, the American photojournalism called out, “Vernon, how the hell much farther is this damn place?”

“Oh, twenty-twenty-twenty minutes, no more,” Vernon told him, showing an agonized smile in the rearview mirror.

Innocent stared at the dancing leering Zotzes: “What are those things?”

“Devils,” Tommy told him.

Halfway up the slope, Kirby stopped to look back. Valerie and Rosita and Luz Coco were cutting and hacking the sheets into squares or rectangles or ovals, a foot and a half or two feet across. None of them were making the circles he’d asked for, but it didn’t really matter. Half the village was running in and out of huts, looking for string. Tommy and Innocent came together out of one of the huts, each carrying a cardboard carton; they started this way.

Kirby nodded, and hurried on over the hill to start Cynthia.

One of the young men of the village came into the clearing. “Soldiers coming,” he announced.

Everyone stopped what they were doing to stare at him or move closer to him or ask, “Who? Which soldiers? What kind of soldiers?”

“Gurruhs,” said the young man, which was as close as they’d come so far to the word Gurkha.

Twice in the last several months Gurkha patrols had moved through here, short black-haired men who held their shoulders proudly and handled their strange severe weapons confidently and yet smiled with amazingly bright teeth. The Gurkhas were a different kind of soldier, without the sullenness and fear and cruelty and tendency toward petty crime — and sometimes major crime — of the soldiers of their previous world. When the young man said, “Gurruhs,” they all smiled and relaxed. That kind of soldier. Fine.

Valerie, her arms billowing with cloth, came over the barren hilltop and saw Kirby Galway just getting into his plane. Innocent and Tommy were partway down the slope, carrying their cartons. Rosita and Luz followed Valerie with the rest of the cloth, and a half dozen villagers straggled up the slope in their wake, carrying bits of string, cord, twine and rope.

Is this going to work? Valerie frowned, thinking of the innocent villagers about to be slaughtered. Against murderers and machine guns, this? But what else is there to do?

She hurried down the farther slope.

Crouched on the blacktop in front of the van, Vernon shook open the map, holding it by its very edge with his fingertips as he guided it to the ground. It slipped from his grasp; he slapped at it. Just out of sight in the brush, Scottie had found a hollow log to piss resoundingly against. Across the road Morgan Lassiter, the woman journalist, was out of both sight and hearing for the moment, having gone discreetly away with a handful of Kleenex. The other news gatherers strolled around the empty road, yawning and stretching. Hiram Farley, the Trend editor, came over to place his Frye boots beside the map and say, “You know where this place is, do you?”

“Oh, yes,” Vernon said, looking up at him, squinting as though he stared into the too-bright sun. Farley’s face showed nothing, his eyes were level and patient. Why do I feel he knows my soul? But that’s just foolishness; if he knew the truth, he’d stop me.

There was some wistfulness in that idea.

“Everything’s fine,” Vernon said.

Innocent said, “Kirby, this is a crazy idea.” With some difficulty he had climbed up on the wing and was leaning in at the plane’s open door so he could talk to Kirby above the engine noise. Wind whipped at his clothing, and the plane trembled all over. “A crazy idea,” he said, more loudly.

Kirby, studying his instrument panel, gave Innocent an impatient look: “Do you have a better one?”

“Radio the police. Radio the British soldiers at Holdfast,” meaning the small British Army detachment out near the Guatemalan border.

“I’ll do that, once we’re airborne, but it won’t do much good. If Valerie’s right, there isn’t time to send for help. At the very worst, maybe we can slow them down.”

Innocent looked past Kirby at Valerie in the other front seat. She was riding with him because she was the only one with a hope of leading him back to where she’d been. Now, her head was bent forward, she was busily tying strings to cloth. Her profile rang like a gong in Innocent’s soul. “By God, she’s alive,” he said.

“And our deal still holds,” Kirby told him.

Was there something underhanded about the deal if Valerie were not dead? No; nothing you could put your finger on. Innocent sighed. “I suppose it does,” he said.

The false Gurkhas entered the village.

Valerie looked up from her knot-tying as the plane suddenly jolted forward. She looked at Kirby, then out at the Indians backing away from the plane. Innocent St. Michael was out there, waving, offering her a kind of sad smile. She hesitated, then smiled and waved back.

Had she been wrong about him? Was Innocent not the arch villain? His almost pathetic pleasure in seeing her alive — she was sure for just one second she had seen a tear in his eye — could not possibly have been pretense. The plane taxied forward, and Innocent was left behind, out of sight. But if Vernon and the skinny black man had not been obeying Innocent’s orders, then whose? Who was the master-mind behind the plot?

This man Kirby, coming so promptly to the rescue of poor endangered Indians he’d never even met, couldn’t be the ringleader. All you had to do was look at him when he wasn’t waving a sword in your face to see he wasn’t the type.

Who, then?

There came into her memory again the last words she had heard between Vernon and the skinny black man in that filthy shack where they’d been holding her prisoner. The skinny black man had said, “Say it out, Vernon. Say what you want.” There had been a pause, and then Vernon had said, so low she could barely hear it, “She has to die.”

It had been his order.

Vernon was the ringleader? He’d certainly been the one to make that particular decision, but somehow the idea of Vernon as Mister Big...

The plane had swung about, and now it suddenly raced madly out across the dry and bumpy ground, shaking itself to pieces. The angle of the plane was such that from inside it they couldn’t see the ground out the windshield but only the sky; how could Kirby be sure there was nothing in front of them?

The roar, the speed, all were so much more present than in a big sensible airliner, and then all at once the trembling stopped, the roar grew somehow less frantic, and out the side window Valerie could see the ground falling away below.

“Tie knots!” Kirby yelled.

“Oh! Yes, sorry.” She bent her head, tied knots, then paused to look at his profile. He was reaching for the microphone, turning dials on the instrument panel. She leaned toward him: “Do you know someone named Vernon?”

He frowned at her. “Vernon What?”

“Never mind,” she said, and went back to tying knots. He gave her an irritable confused look, then started talking into the microphone in his cupped hand.

“It will be along here,” Vernon said, the van moving slowly as he watched the right-hand verge. The jungle was deep and green and moist, tumbled and piled up high on the right. Behind him, the journalists started gathering their paraphernalia.

“Yes, there it is.”

Vernon braked to a stop, then turned the van very slowly off the road and onto an up-tilted patch of eroded rutted ground, cleared barely as wide as the vehicle, with stones and dirt and roots under its wheels. Engine roaring, the van struggled up the slope, branches and vines scraping both sides. Vernon clutched hard to the steering wheel, as boulders tried to deflect the wheels and drive him into tree trunks or ditches. Even at two or three miles an hour, the van jounced so badly that everybody in it had to hold on.

Too narrow; too steep; impossible. Vernon stopped the van, switched off the engine. In the sudden humming silence, he said, “We have to walk from here.”

“Hold on, chum,” Scottie called. “The idea was, this place is accessible.”

“It’s just up ahead there,” Vernon said, pointing out the windshield. “We just walk up to it.”

“Accessible by vehicle, old son.”

“Not past here.”

Tom, the American photojournalism leaned forward to look past Vernon’s shoulder, saying, “A Land Rover would make it.”

“Too many of us for a Land Rover.” Vernon’s eyelids were fluttering, he was aware of black-and-white pinwheels at the extreme edges of his peripheral vision.

Scottie, all jollity gone, called, “There’s no villages easier to get to than this?”

“Oh, come along, Scottie,” Morgan Lassiter said. “Work some of that lard off your gut.” And she slid open the van door to climb out.

That did it. With a woman to lead the way, the men all sheepishly followed, climbing down out of the van, pushing past the leaves and branches, hanging their canvas bags of equipment on their shoulders.

“This way,” Vernon said. His legs were trembling, his knees were jelly, but none of it showed. “This way,” he said. Soon it will be over. “This way.” He started up the hill.

Why am I doing this? Kirby wondered. Of all the brainless things I have ever done in my life, this has to rank right up there among the best of them. Buying Innocent’s land, for instance; this could conceivably be even dumber than that.

In the first place, there’s no reason on Earth for this stunt to work.

In the second place, the woman I’m helping, this Valerie Greene riding along with me on this rescue mission, is the primary cause of all my recent trouble, and is someone I dislike so intensely I’m amazed I’m not at this moment shoving her out of the plane.

In the third place, whether the stunt works or not, the end result of trying it must be that the temple scam is blown permanently and forever. Innocent already knows too much about it, Valerie Greene is going to figure things out any minute now, and even the people on the ground are likely to catch on, once the fun is over.

In the fourth place, some of those people on the ground have machine guns and could possibly even shoot Cynthia out of the sky.

In the fifth place, it isn’t my fight.

Valerie, busily tying knots, said, “I really appreciate this, Mr. Galway. I don’t know how to thank you.”

“It’s nothing,” Kirby said.

The Quiché Indians of western Guatemala are not among the tribes who speak some variant of Kekchi. It was in a different language entirely — mixed with some Spanish — that the people welcomed the Gurruh soldiers, smiling at them, nodding, gesturing for them to sit a moment, offering them water.

The Gurruh looked around, not seeming to know what to do. They talked to one another in their-incomprehensible tongue, they smiled rather meaninglessly at the people, and they wandered around the outsides of the three huts, gazing at things. One of them picked up the female piglet and held it high with one hand around its neck, the piglet squeaking and its pink hoofs thrashing the air as the Gurruh said something to the other soldiers and laughed. Then he put the piglet down again.

There was some strangeness about these Gurruh, all the people sensed it. They weren’t like the first two groups, they didn’t exude the same air of self-sufficiency and disinterested amiability. One of them went into a hut uninvited, picked up an orange without asking, and came out eating it.

A young man of the village, an Alpuche, had been looking toward the trail that led down to the road. “Someone else is coming,” he said.

“Can you circle just once more!” Valerie Greene asked. She was tying nooses now.

Kirby, a bit annoyed, banked Cynthia hard and made a gliding swooping turn over the tumbled land below. “You’re the one says it’s urgent.”

“I just want to be sure.” Noose in hand, she peered down at that disorderly maze of greens and browns. “Yes! There’s the stream where I— That’s the stream from this morning. See it?”

Kirby rolled Cynthia over and came back, while Valerie clung open-mouthed to her seat. “Got it,” he said. “Due north from there they said?”

“One—” Silence.

Kirby looked over and saw her distress. “Sorry,” he said, and turned Cynthia right side up. “One hour north,” he said. “On foot.”

“Yes,” Valerie said.

The false Gurkhas saw the people looking toward the trail up from the road, and unlimbered their Sterling submachine guns. The villagers, already sensing something wrong about these soldiers, now drew back, wide-eyed, and everybody in the small clearing grew silent, except the female piglet, still squealing and shrilling about the indignity that had been done her.

High above, the sky was clear and blue. Thick brush and great trees surrounded the clearing, arching high overhead, and smaller trees had been left to stand beside the huts for shade. Except in the very center, where steady sunlight shone on their plantings, the settlement was dappled with rays reaching through the trees, angling down to touch with creamy light this person, that hut, that finger resting gently on a trigger. At the narrow end of the clearing, a patch of hotter, brighter light backed by fuzzy greens and yellows showed the top of the trail up from the road.

An Espejo girl, eight years old, picked up the piglet and cradled it in her arms. Her thudding heartbeat calmed the piglet, which grew quiet.

A straggling group of eight people, hot and sweaty and sun-dazzled, appeared at the end of the silent clearing and came slowly in, looking around themselves.

Vernon saw the Gurkhas, saw them holding the machine guns, and moaned as he dropped to his knees, unaware of the journalists staring at him in astonishment. “No,” he said, too late.

“The last one,” Valerie said, tightening the final noose on the final neck.

“Good.”

The hurried work finished, Valerie for the first time had a chance to actually look at these things. She held a small statue in each hand, the identical little evil creatures capering there with the nooses around their necks. “These—” she said, and frowned. “Are you sure these are real?”

“Van parked there, in from the blacktop road. See it?”

She saw it, partway into the green jungle, white roof gleaming, front of the vehicle pointed west, away from the road. “This must be it!”

“And the visitors are here already.”

Valerie clutched tightly to the Zotzilaha Chimalmans as the plane banked and dropped low to the ground.

The sound of a passing plane was drowned by the chatter. Nine-millimeter bullets stuttered across the clearing, chopping Scottie’s legs out from under him and punching Vernon’s stomach three times, in a line just above his belt. People screamed and ran, and three villagers fell bleeding.

The plane was louder, not passing after all. Disturbed at their work, the false Gurkhas looked up as the plane roared through the clearing, sideways, right wingtip pointing down at them as though to say, “You. I see you.”

“Throw them!” Kirby yelled. “Throw them!”

Valerie was too busy to answer. She was lying on her side, against the side wall of the plane, elbow on the fixed part of the window. As quickly as she could, she pushed the little statues one at a time through the window flap.

Zotzilaha Chimalman. Out of the plane he fell, time after time, swathed in cotton material, the cloth pulling away in the breeze of his falling. The noose around his neck was made of four strings, tied to four edges of the cloth; enough of a parachute for such a little devil.

Two false Gurkhas lifted their Sterlings, but the plane was already through the clearing and gone, circling. The people were running into the jungle, the journalists lay flat in the sunlight. Creatures floated down out of the sky.

Cynthia made a hard, tight circle through the air, left wing straight up and right wing straight down, and once more she crashed through the clearing. More demons plummeted from her side.

A false Gurkha aimed his Sterling at one of the things parachuting toward him. He peered through the metal arch of the foresight protector, focusing on the gray-brown figure in the air. He recognized it. A great fright struck him and he stared, forgetting to shoot.

Vernon, curled in a tight ball around the agony in his stomach, wept, and blamed the Colonel for everything.

A false Gurkha clutched a statue out of the air, held it in his hand, stared at it in disbelief. Dirt clung to it, as though it had just come from the grave; some of the dirt was now on his hand. Suddenly, he flung the thing away. He thought his hand was burning. Stepping back, his foot rolled on a statue on the ground; it tried to trip him, bite him, bring him down. He shrieked, threw away his Sterling, and ran.

“There aren’t any more!” Valerie cried.

Kirby lifted Cynthia up and away. Valerie tried to see back to the village. “Wait! What’s happening back there?”

“Give them a minute to think about it. Then we’ll go back and see.”

What was this airplane? How had it come to be exactly where the false Gurkhas were, exactly at the moment when they were starting their work? Had they been betrayed? Were other enemies on the way?

These were the rational problems, the sensible questions, the meaningful dilemmas. They were as nothing beside the creatures hanging in the sky.

Twenty Zotzilahas floating down through the dappled air, falling one by one to the ground, gathering their cotton cloaks about themselves, grimacing and winking and grinning at the false Gurkhas, three more of whom flung away their guns and ran for the jungle.

“Come back!” the leader shouted, and fired after them, missing.

Another, backing away from the devils, saw the leader turn eyes and gun in his direction and he fired first, killing the leader 11 times.

Two more murderers in Gurkha uniform ran away into the jungle, these keeping their weapons.

Valerie stared back at the anonymous green. She wanted to see. Fretfully, she said, “Could they be that afraid of clay?”

“Their ancestors were.”

The false Gurkhas had been brought up in Christian homes. They had been taught to know and to love God and the Blessed Virgin Mary and all the saints. They had been taught to despise Satan and all his works. They had risen above such education, and struck out to live their own lives by their own rules.

No one had ever told them they had to believe in the Mayan gods and the Mayan devils. Those beings were there in the stories, that’s all, there in the drawings and the cloth designs and the carvings, there in the rites and ceremonies that a minority of their older relatives sometimes engaged in. Nobody had ever told them they had to believe in Zotzilaha Chimalman, and yet none of them had ever in his heart doubted that the cave of bats existed, the forked road to eternity existed, the evil hater of mankind was there in the darkness just waiting the opportunity to drag them down to eternal death.

He flies, Zotzilaha, he comes out of the sky like a bat. He is full of tricks and malevolence. If he catches you when your heart is black, you’re doomed.

When the sound of the plane was heard again in the clearing, there were only five false Gurkhas left in it, four living and their leader, who was dead. The dead one lay surrounded by images of Zotzilaha Chimalman.

When the silence in the clearing ended, filled up instead by the growing buzz of the airplane, the last four of the false Gurkhas faded away into the jungle.

The plane roared overhead again, and gone, and Vernon opened his eyes. Through his pain and tears he could see the villagers clustered around their three fallen relatives, the journalists gathering around Scottie. Hiram Farley, separate from both groups, bent to pick up one of the figures that had fallen from the plane.

Vernon closed his eyes. Everything he saw was red. The pain in his stomach was duller and his brain seemed to move more slowly.

When he opened his eyes again, Hiram Farley was standing over him, hefting the little statue in his hand. “Well, Vernon,” Farley said.

Vernon slowly blinked. With his mouth open to breathe, dirt was filtering in, coating his tongue and teeth.

“Now why, Vernon,” Farley said, “would Asian soldiers be afraid of a Central American devil? Something tells me you can answer that question.”

Vernon looked at Farley’s dusty boots. He mumbled something.

“What was that, Vernon?”

“ ‘They didn’t even kill me,’ I said.”

22 Chicken Estelle (Serves Four)

“That isn’t south Abilene,” Valerie said.

Kirby Galway turned the little plane in a long slow parabola, out and around, while down below a man and woman chased goats from the long green field surrounded by forest. At one end of the field was a squat brown house with several additions, and behind it patches of cultivation. “No, it isn’t,” Galway said.

She gave his bland profile an extremely suspicious look. “What is it, then?”

“Where I live.”

“Why are we going there?” After all she’d been through, must she now defend herself from this man’s attentions?

Galway made minor adjustments with the plane’s controls; its nose was aimed now at that long field, with the tiny house and the tiny people at the far end and the goats all cleared away. He said, “I want to talk to you before you talk to Innocent.”

“Why?”

“I’ll tell you when we’re on the ground.”

She watched him, but he had nothing else to say. But wasn’t what he’d already said significant, didn’t it mean once and for all that Kirby Galway was not in league with Innocent St. Michael? If there was some secret he wanted to keep from Innocent — and what else could he be planning? — it meant they weren’t partners in crime after all.

So which one was the criminal?

And what was the crime?

It was all too confusing. She had seen the temple, exactly where it was supposed to be, where she and the computers had both predicted it would be, and then two weeks later, at the precise same spot, it was gone. She had seen Kirby Galway with Whitman Lemuel from that museum and had known it meant they were stealing rare Mayan treasures and smuggling them out of the country, but when she’d at last held several of those treasures in her hands she’d found herself doubting they were real. She had thought Vernon was working for Galway or Innocent or possibly both of them, and now it seemed to turn out he’d been working only for himself. And what had Vernon been trying to do? Get his hands on the (fake) treasures of the (nonexistent) temple? She shook her head, and spoke her frustration aloud: “What is everybody up to?”

He laughed. “I’m actually going to tell you,” he said, and the plane bounced on the uneven turf, bounced again, landed, settled, and slowed to a sedate roll as they neared the house, where the man and woman stood waiting, smiling.

“I’m beginning to remember,” Valerie said slowly, “that you’re a very bad man. You are, aren’t you?”

“Extremely bad,” he said, and the plane turned toward a copse of trees on the right.

“Except when you’re rescuing people,” she acknowledged.

“My one saving grace,” he said, and the plane stopped in tree shadow. Galway switched off the engine, and the silence flowed in like a wave.

There was no door on her side. She had to wait while he unstrapped and climbed out, then follow him, crawling across his seat and accepting his hand to balance her as she made it down to the ground.

The air here was very warm and heavy after so long in the plane, and she found herself stiff and sore when she tried to walk. The couple had come over to greet them — the man short, the woman much shorter — and Galway led Valerie around the wing to make the introductions: “Estelle Cruz, Manny Cruz, this is Valerie Greene.”

“How do you do?”

“Hello, hello, hello.”

When Manny Cruz smiled, he had many more spaces for teeth than he had teeth, but somehow that merely made his smile look happier. And for such a gnarled little woman, Estelle Cruz’s smile was surprisingly shy and girlish.

Galway removed both those smiles by then saying, “Miss Greene is an extremely annoying woman who has absolutely loused up everything I’ve been doing here.”

Estelle glared at Valerie, who gaped at her accuser in shock. Manny said, “This is Sheena! So she is alive.” He didn’t sound happy about it.

“That’s right,” Galway said. “The temple scam is dead, everything’s gone to hell in a handbasket, and I’ll probably have to move out of this country.”

The Cruzes were both terribly shocked. Estelle looked as though she might leap on Valerie and claw her to death, while Manny said, “Move from this house, Kirby?”

“It isn’t her fault, Manny,” Galway said. “She didn’t do it on purpose; she’s just stupid and ignorant.”

“Now, wait a minute,” Valerie said.

“She thought she was doing right,” Galway went smoothly on, “so I don’t blame her. And now she can help me in one little way, and that’s why I brought her here, to tell her the whole story, and I’m sure she’s going to want to help out.”

Valerie looked at them all suspiciously, even Estelle, whose manner was just as mistrustful as her own. “I won’t commit any crimes,” she said.

Galway gave her an enigmatic look: “If I were going to commit a crime, Miss Greene,” he said, “you’re about the last person I’d ask to be my accomplice.”

If that was an insult — and it did seem to have been intended as such — it had to be one of the strangest insults in history. Feeling mulish and put-upon, Valerie said, “That’s all right, then.”

Manny said, “Whadaya want her to do, Kirby?”

“Let’s talk over lunch,” Galway said. “I’m starved.” Looking at Valerie, he said, “How about you?”

Dear God! Her stomach! In all the excitement and activity and confusion, she hadn’t even noticed, but all of a sudden her stomach gave her such a hunger pang she actually gasped from it. Food? When was the last time she’d eaten? Nothing at all today, nothing since last night, on the run, when she’d eaten those tortillas.

The very thought made her head swim.

“Right,” Galway said, correctly reading her expression. “We’ll just wash up and then eat out here, Estelle, okay?”

Estelle nodded, tentatively smiling again, waving at the outdoor table beside the house.

Galway said, “Kids all in school? Just the four of us? What are we having?”

“Escabeche,” said Estelle.

“Oh, my, this is good,” Valerie said.

“There’s more,” Estelle told her, beaming from wrinkled ear to wrinkled ear.

“More beer?” Manny asked. “Kirby? Valerie?”

“Oh, yes,” everybody said, and Valerie was surprised to find herself smiling at Kirby, who grinned back and reached for another tortilla.

Kirby. Valerie. They were on a first-name basis now, ever since he had shown her into his surprisingly neat and Spartan apartment to clean up before lunch and she’d said, “Which door is the bathroom, Mister Galway?” and he had looked at her and said, “I don’t like to be called Mister Galway except by the police, and I refuse to call you Miss Greene any more, so what shall we call each other? Shall I call you Fido, and you call me Spot?” So that was that.

Sunlight gleamed on the yellow hair on Kirby Galway’s arm as he raised his spoon and ate. She kept glancing at him, thinking he had a good laugh and an easy self-confident manner, and it was too bad really that he was such a villain. If, in fact, he was a villain.

Was he not a villain? At his most furious with her, when he was waving that sword about, he hadn’t actually used it on her. A villain — and Valerie had met some villains now — would certainly have sliced her head off at that point, and thought no more about it.

Nor was he even a vile seducer. The contrast between this lunch and the eating of conch with Innocent that time was so extreme it almost made her laugh out loud. Innocent had been so smooth and so accomplished, and had just filled her mind with thoughts of sex. Kirby Galway laughed and told jokes and ate his escabeche and didn’t try to manipulate her at all, made not the slightest effort to fill her mind with thoughts of sex.

And if her mind was filled with thoughts of sex, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, making her blush — they’ll think it’s the hot sauce, and it almost is — she knew enough psychology to know it was merely a normal reaction to being in safety after a period of (extreme danger and extended physical stress.

And, of course, the sun gleaming on the yellow hair on Kirby’s arm.

He looked up and caught her eye and grinned, and she looked down at her bowl, suddenly flustered. Then, afraid she’d given herself away, she looked over at him again and he was frowning slightly at his own bowl, thinking about something.

Time to change the subject. “Listen, Kirby,” she said. “You wanted to tell me something.”

“Right.” He nodded at her, his brow clearing. “You’re right, Valerie,” he said. “It’s time I told you what’s been going on.”

“Good,” she said, and went on eating while he talked.

23 How To Make Money in Real Estate

Kirby told her the truth, almost every last little bit of it. “My big mistake,” he started, “was when I bought some land from Innocent,” and then he went on to tell her about the land, his finances, his meeting with Tommy Watson and the other Indians, his invention of the temple and the Indians faking the artifacts under Tommy’s direction, and Kirby himself going off to find his suckers in America to buy the fakes. “They think they’re breaking the law, so they don’t tell anybody about it.”

“So what I saw,” Valerie said, with a wondering expression, “was your fake temple.”

“A little bit of it, from a distance.”

“It was very good.”

“That was mostly Tommy’s doing. Anyway, when I first met you,” and he went on to describe Valerie’s inadvertent foiling of his first attempt to snare Whitman Lemuel, mentioning it with hardly any visible resentment at all, and then went on to tell her about the Indians dismantling the fake temple just as soon as she’d seen it, because everybody knew she was on her way back to Belmopan to report her discovery.

At that point, Valerie took over briefly, and told Kirby about her experiences with Vernon and the skinny black man and her wanderings in the wilderness, all of which had apparently been very difficult and frightening, though she was brave about it in the recital.

Kirby then took over again, saying, “Well, anyway, you were lost, and Innocent kept going back and forth between believing you were alive and believing you were dead, and if you were dead then he was sure I was pulling some con to persuade him you were alive for some reason, and back and forth like that. Also, he was going crazy about that hill and is there or isn’t there a temple.”

“We were all going crazy, Kirby.”

“Well,” Kirby said, “I offered him a deal. Buy the damn land back from me at the same price I paid for it, and I’d tell him the absolute truth about you and the temple, whether you were alive or not, and what the temple scam was.”

Valerie looked quite interested: “Did he say yes?”

“He did.”

“Well, that was very sweet,” she said, looking doe-eyed. “That Innocent would worry about me that much.”

“Sure,” Kirby said. “But that’s why I didn’t take you back there just now. Innocent and I no sooner shook hands on the deal when you showed up alive, so he already has that part. That’s half my deal gone already. Now, with what you already knew about my land and the people in South Abilene, and with what Innocent already knew, he could have put together for himself what I was doing with my temple scam, not needing to pay me to tell him about it, and that’s the other half. So why does he need me any more?”

“Oh,” Valerie said.

“If I know Innocent — and I do — at that point he would have found some way to weasel out of buying back the land.”

“So you don’t want me to talk to him,” Valerie said, “until fie has the land and you have your money.”

“That’s right.”

Her expression was extremely enigmatic: “Do you mean I’ve been kidnapped again?”

Feeling a bit uncomfortable, Kirby said, “I was hoping, after I explained the whole thing, you’d sort of see it my way and agree to wait a little while. Not long. I mean, nobody’s pinning your arms down or anything.”

“Mmm,” she said, and folded her arms across her breasts to sort of pat her own biceps.

“It would just be for a day or two,” Kirby assured her.

“Mmm,” she said again, and then she yawned, covering her mouth with her hand. “I’m too tired to think now, Kirby,” she said. Raising her arms over her head, she arched her back and strrrretched. She was, Kirby noticed, very interesting when she stretched. “Lunch was delicious,” she told Estelle lazily, “but it made me so sleepy.”

“That’s good,” Estelle said. “You just sit, I clean up.”

Looking over at Kirby, her eyes round and guileless, Valerie said, “Your little apartment looked so cool and comfortable. Maybe I could just go there and take a nap.”

“Sure,” Kirby said, getting up from the table. “I’ll walk you over.”

She smiled, looking up at him from under her lashes as she rose.

Sex. How about that? If he and Valerie Greene got a little something on together, maybe she’d be more on his side in re Innocent. He had no idea where that idea came from, it was just suddenly there, just sort of popped up into his mind.

He ignored Estelle’s giggle as he escorted Valerie around the comer of the house.

24 Present Imperfect

Saturday morning and Innocent sat in his office in Belmopan, his old self again, playing the telephone like a virtuoso, taking care of business he’d let go all to hell, covering his ass in every conceivable direction, and primarily seeing to it that none of the mud from the Vernon affair would stick to his own voluminous skirts.

Vernon. Who would have guessed? “I trusted that boy,” Innocent muttered aloud, yet even as he said it he knew that wasn’t the really accurate way to describe the situation. Innocent hadn’t exactly trusted Vernon, it wasn’t in Innocent’s character or training to throw something like trust around with a lavish hand, but what he had done was something that had the exact same effect as misplaced trust: he had underestimated Vernon. Patronized him, condescended to him, assumed that Vernon had no importance.

“And all along he was selling me out.”

Selling out his nation, too, of course, but that was secondary. He had betrayed Innocent, which meant Innocent had been unwary enough to get into a position where betrayal was possible. Now, among all the other things he was taking care of today, Innocent was going through Vernon’s desk and correspondence files, seeing what other unpleasant surprises might be in store, while down in Belize City Hospital Vernon was busily spilling what guts he had left, telling everything he knew about everything, naming every name.

“He could hurt me, that boy, if I’m not quick.”

“Talking to yourself, Innocent?”

Innocent looked up, frowning, not liking to believe he was the sort of person who talked to himself, certainly not wanting to be caught at it, and there was Kirby, grinning in the doorway, dressed for flying business in his open-neck shirt and khaki slacks and sturdy boots. “Well, Kirby,” Innocent growled, seeing nothing in that doorway that pleased him, “and what the hell happened to you yesterday?”

“Saved a village,” Kirby told him, grinning. “Went home to rest.”

“And what about Valerie?”

“Here she is.” Kirby stepped into the office then, and Valerie followed, looking happy and healthy and just a bit sheepish.

That son of a gun took her to bed, Innocent thought. There was pain in the thought, but also release. One of the things he’d been trying not to think about ever since Kirby and Valerie and the plane had all flown away yesterday from South Abilene was what he would feel — and what Valerie would feel — the next time they saw one another. The gradual suspicion had been forming inside him that the great life-changing love he had felt for Valerie was perhaps easier to maintain when she was dead or disappeared, a great mythic figure, than when she was an actual flesh-and-blood girl. The epiphany that Kirby had claimed Innocent was having the night before last in South Abilene had been a great shaking and cleansing of his system, long overdue he now believed, but it probably wouldn’t have been possible if Valerie had not been both (1) good, and (2) unobtainable.

So what should their relationship be, now that she was no longer among the missing and he’d already had his apotheosis? To go on being obsessed by her when she was present would be kind of silly, but what was the alternative?

On the other hand, even if she were no longer a goddess on earth but merely a woman, she was still quite an intriguing woman, and that pleasant afternoon spent in Vernon’s house — Vernon! by God, he knows so much! — was something Innocent would not at all mind repeating. Just how long would it take to get used to and bored with this great big tall girl with her happy enjoyments? It would be fun to find out.

But it was not to be. One look at Valerie, and a second look at Kirby, confirmed it, and a moment of sadness and nostalgia and regret passed over Innocent, like the final tremor when you’re getting over the flu. But then it was washed away by a sudden flood of relief: He would not have to follow through on his protestations of love after all. He would not have to behave toward Valerie present as he had sworn he wanted to when she was Valerie absent. He could have his epiphany, and get away with it!

“Well, come on in, you two,” he said, rising from behind his desk, beaming at them, coming all over avuncular. “Looks to me like you’ve buried the hatchet.”

“We straightened out one or two things,” Kirby agreed.

“We talked it all out,” Valerie said, smiling softly, “and we understand one another now.”

“But what we’re here for, Innocent,” Kirby said, “I want to make good on our deal. You already know about Valerie, but I promised to tell you about the temple.”

“Oh, you don’t have to, Kirby,” Innocent said, just as smiling and open and friendly as anything. “What I saw in South Abilene, and talking with Tommy Watson, I’ve got it pretty well figured out by now.”

“Hmm,” said Kirby. He didn’t seem pleased.

“And then the tape, that helped,” Innocent said. “But you haven’t heard the tape, have you?”

“What tape?”

So Innocent got the tape out of the locked desk drawer and put it in the cassette player, and once again those sounds and words filled his office: “This way, gentlemen. Watch out for snakes.” Throk. “The noise keeps them in their holes.”

Valerie just looked bewildered, but Kirby stared at the cassette player as though it were his ancestors’ form of Zotzilaha Chimalman. The words and the sound effects went on, and Kirby just stood there and stared and listened until his own voice said, “Do you know how many people there are in New Jersey?” and that other voice said, “No one I know.”

“Witcher and Feldspan!”

Innocent hit the STOP button. “They recorded every conversation with you, Kirby.”

“Holy Christ! Those two?”

“Never underestimate people,” Innocent said: Vernon.

“But— They’re legitimate antique dealers!”

“That’s right. Doing undercover reporter work for a friend of theirs named Hiram Farley, editor of a big American magazine called Trend. Ever hear of Trend, Kirby?”

“Those dirty bastards.”

“I managed to have them lose these tapes at the airport,” Innocent said, “or otherwise you and your temple would be all over Trend magazine by now. You didn’t know I was helping you like that, did you?”

“Didn’t want me blown out of the water,” Kirby said, “until you figured out what I was up to and how you could horn in on it.”

“You always think the worst of me, Kirby,” Innocent said, and risked a smile at Valerie, telling her, “I hope you won’t be like that, Valerie.”

“I always say nice things about you, Mister St. Michael,” Valerie said.

Innocent almost laughed out loud. Oh, good, Kirby, you have no idea what you’re hooked onto here. He said, “The point is, Kirby, if you think of dealing with those fellas again, just remember these tapes.”

“Oh, I will,” Kirby said grimly, “but the deal I most want to talk about, Innocent, is ours. We did shake hands on—”

“Kirby, Kirby, do you think I’d try to reneg?”

Kirby frowned at him: “You won’t?”

“Certainly not. It’s true I know Valerie’s alive without you having to tell me; there she is, as beautiful as ever.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“And it’s true I know all about your fake temple without you telling me. But, Kirby, I’d like to think I’m an honorable man. Why, I’ve been doing nothing at all this morning except put together this paperwork on our transaction.” And he handed over the manila folder.

Kirby, looking dubious, settled into one of the side chairs, opened the folder, and started to read. Innocent said to Valerie, “I am glad you’re safe, Valerie.”

“So am I,” she said, smiling.

“I keep remembering that lunch we had together, and how much you liked the conch. You did like the conch, didn’t you?”

She giggled, a sound Innocent would long cherish. “I liked it a lot,” she said.

“Wait a minute,” Kirby said. “This isn’t even half what I paid you.”

“Read on,” Innocent urged him. “You’ll see it makes sense.”

“Not if I’m— What? I’m taking back a mortgage?”

“That’s right,” Innocent said, with his blandest smile.

Kirby looked outraged. “People don’t give mortgages on land.”

Innocent shrugged. “All the trouble there’s been lately, I’d have a hard time right now getting my hands on that much cash. But I didn’t want to let our deal fall through just because I didn’t have enough cash money, and I knew you’d want to get all this settled and have some money to take with you when you leave, so—”

“Leave? Where am I going?”

Innocent gave Kirby a friendly but troubled look. “Don’t you know what your situation right now is, Kirby?”

“I’m being shafted by you, as per usual.”

“No no no. Kirby, you’re a hero.”

Valerie smiled and said, “Isn’t that nice?”

“Well, yes and no,” Innocent told her. “Unfortunately, Kirby’s the sort of hero who would be very smart to be modest and avoid the limelight.”

Kirby said, “Tell me about it.”

“Your radio calls to Holdfast and the police,” Innocent said, “meant help got there within thirty minutes of you breaking up the massacre. Two villagers dead, five terrorists dead, three captured and talking. Those little statues you threw out of the plane are being studied right now by a whole lot of experts. An American photojournalist on the scene managed to get some very dramatic shots of your plane coming through the clearing, in which your registration number is clearly visible.”

“Oh,” Kirby said.

“Right now,” Innocent went on, “Kirby Galway is the brave pilot who saved the defenseless village. However, I happen to know several people who are out and around Belize looking for the hero, because there’s just one or two questions.”

Kirby sighed. Valerie said, “Mister St. Michael, what does this mean?”

“It means if Kirby’s smart,” Innocent told her, “he’ll leave Belize. Just for a while, till it all blows over. Say three or four years.”

Kirby sighed again. Innocent smiled amiably and said, “That’s why I worked so hard to get you just the best deal I could before you leave. A nice ten-year mortgage. And if you add up the purchase price and all the interest payments over the ten years, you’ll find it comes out to precisely what you paid me for the land in the first place.”

“And you get to write off interest payments and...” Kirby shook his head, disgusted. “You’ll put the whole amount in a high-yield investment, make my payments out of the interest, and it’ll never cost you a thing. And you’ll have the land. You’ll make money on this!”

“You’ll have your purchase price back, Kirby,” Innocent pointed out, and spread his hands. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

Kirby gave Valerie a long-suffering look. “Valerie,” he said, “if you ever see me even talking to this fella again, run over and knock me down.”

Valerie laughed, her eyes gleaming as she watched them both, enjoying herself.

Innocent pointed to the folder. “And down in there, Kirby,” he said, “you’ll find a check for the first month’s payment. How’s that?”

“Terrific,” Kirby said bitterly. Then he shook his head again, and sighed, and said, “Okay, Innocent, you win. Where do I sign?”

25 Crossroads of Destiny

Trump Glade, Florida. Route 216 south 8.4 miles from the movie house. Left at the sign reading Potchaw 12. Whitman Lemuel peered out the windshield of the rented car and there it was, a battered old metal sign, shot to death by any number of retarded louts but still discernibly reading, “Potchaw 12.” And the odometer showed exactly eight point four miles since he’d passed the movie house in Trump Glade.

The Potchaw sign included an arrow, which pointed off to the right, where a blacktop road ran away between orange groves, but Kirby Galway’s directions said to go the other way, so Lemuel spun the wheel and the rental turned left onto the dirt road meandering out across the flatness of Florida’s scrub.

Now it was supposed to be 15.2 miles on to where he would find a red ribbon on a barbed wire fence. Turning up the air conditioning slightly, Lemuel relaxed a bit against the seat, and drove slowly but steadily toward his meeting with Kirby Galway.

Of course Galway expected those two New York merchants, Witcher and Feldspan, but he would certainly be willing to make his arrangements with Lemuel instead, once he understood that Witcher and Feldspan were now out of the picture completely.

The memory of Feldspan on that airplane, and the revolting horror he’d created up and down those aisles, came back suddenly into the forefront of Lemuel’s brain, complete with sensory elements, and his lip curled in remembered disgust. It was better those two were out of it, much better.

Actually, Alan Witcher would have been prepared to go forward, but Gerry Feldspan was just too nervous for the job. Some other passenger had looked at him wrong and the result was absolute chaos; fortunately, Feldspan at least did manage to be sick at one point on the passenger who’d started all the trouble, apparently ruining a quite valuable harmonica.

But the upshot — well; perhaps we’ll find a better word — the result of it all was that, in the Miami Airport, Feldspan absolutely shrieked that he was never going to commit another crime, he wanted nothing to do with smugglers, on and on and on, it was a miracle he didn’t get the entire terminal arrested. Witcher, alternating between icy embarrassment and quite touching concern for his friend’s well-being, at last agreed it was impossible for them to go forward, they would have to abandon the project forever. They would turn around at once and fly right back to New York — “And get back that letter somehow,” Witcher had said mysteriously — and leave the field to Lemuel.

Which they had. So here he was, driving 15.2 miles down this dirt road to his first rendezvous with Kirby Galway.

It was better for it to end this way, really. Witcher and Feldspan, apart from their rather nauseatingly blatant homosexuality, were merely merchants, the exact kind of money-grubbing art-denying dealers who had given the import of precious antiquities such a bad name, so it was just as well they wouldn’t be getting their greedy little hands on any of the treasures from Galway’s temple. As for Galway himself, the man was merely a thug, wasn’t he, personally beneath contempt but useful as a tool in rescuing these treasures from the ignorance of the Central Americans and the venality of the likes of Witcher and Feldspan, so he could turn them over to selfless, dedicated, intelligent, learned, honest, unimpeachable scientists like himself.

He was the only truly decent character in the whole story, and he knew it.

And, as happened far too rarely in real life, this time the decent character was going to win. The meeting with Kirby Galway would happen in just the next few minutes, and whatever Kirby Galway was bringing to give to Witcher and Feldspan he could dam well just give to Whitman Lemuel instead.

“I deserve it,” Lemuel muttered, as he drove.

The next section of barbed wire fence beyond the red ribbon had fallen in, making access easy, so Lemuel was already out on the weedy spongy field when the airplane first appeared. It circled overhead, he waved, and down it came, landing at the opposite end of the field and roaring over to come to a stop just near where Lemuel was standing.

The door opened in its side as Lemuel came around the wing, and there was Kirby Galway clambering out, seeming in an awful hurry. In fact, the engines still ran, propellers spinning, plane all atremble to be off.

Galway looked at him in surprise. (There was someone else in the plane.) “Where’s Witcher and Feldspan?” he shouted, above the engine noise.

For some reason, Lemuel gestured behind himself, saying, “They went—”

“Still in the car? Okay, this is for them.”

“No, they—”

Galway turned back and wrestled with something in the seat behind the pilot’s, the other person helping. Lemuel stared, bewildered, and some sort of bale of hay came free at last, dropping out of the doorway, bouncing off the wing, landing on the ground at Lemuel’s feet. “What—”

“Sorry you’re getting it, too,” Galway told him, grinning, not looking sorry at all. “Tell your pals in the car, I know all about Trend.”

“Oh, my God. What have you—”

“Anonymous call to the DEA,” Kirby told him, with nasty satisfaction.

“The what? What’s that?”

“Drug Enforcement Administration,” Kirby said, and climbed back up into the pilot’s seat. “Sorry you’re here,” he called. “You should watch the company you keep.”

Which was when Lemuel recognized the second person in the plane, and it was Valerie Greene. “YOU!” he cried.

She nodded and smiled, with a little wave.

“Every time I see you something terrible happens!” Lemuel shrieked, pointing at the girl. Kirby pulled his door shut and the plane moved away. “This is the third time!” Lemuel screamed, following after, shaking his fist. “You’re a jinx!”

The plane picked up speed, leaving him. Lemuel stopped, suddenly panting for some reason. And now that the engine roar was receding, the plane was way over there lifting into the air, Lemuel could hear another sound, behind him, far in the distance.

Sirens.

Getting closer.

He turned and looked back toward the rental car parked on the little narrow dirt road, and his eye fell on the bale Kirby had pulled from the plane.

“That isn’t hay,” he said aloud.

Third time lucky.

26 Sailing Directions (En Route) for the Caribbean Sea

Valerie sewed with tiny stitches. Perched naked tailor-fashion on a beach blanket bearing a picture of Mickey Mouse surfing — seated mostly on his smile — she was up from the beach just far enough to be in the dappled shade of the coconut palms. Behind her, just visible through the ring-necked trunks of the trees, was the island’s only enclosed structure, a low house of unpainted concrete block with a slanted metal roof, flanked by the television satellite dish on the left and the electricity-generating windmill on the right. In front, the calm blue Caribbean folded itself time and time again on the beige sand.

Deceptively calm. The unnamed wee island on which Valerie sat and sewed the hem of a full white cotton skirt lay deep within the perimeter of a well-known nautical hazard, the Banco Chinchorro, about 16 miles off the Yucatan coast of Mexico, due west of Chetumal Bay. At latitude 18 degrees, 23 minutes north and longitude 87 degrees, 27 minutes west, and existing mostly just below the surface of the sea, the four-mile-wide area of Banco Chinchorro is described in the United States Government publication Sailing Directions (En Route) for the Caribbean Sea, which Valerie had looked at shortly after arrival here, as “a dangerous steep-to shoal” with “numerous rocky heads and sand banks. The stranded wrecks which lie along the E side of the shoal were reported conspicuous both visually and by radar.” This navigators’ guide finishes its description with a “Caution. — In the vicinity of Banco Chinchorro there is usually a very strong current that sets toward its entire E side.”

Commercial shipping and pleasure craft alike steer well around Banco Chinchorro. And yet, on a few of its tiny islets, the beach is wide and clean, the sea is blue and gentle and nearly transparent, the air is warm and soft with a delicious easterly breeze. If you’d like to be alone with your sweetheart, there are few better spots on Earth than this.

Apart from Valerie herself, and the small house with its dish and windmill, the only other sign of human incursion on this island was Cynthia’s wheelmarks on the hardpacked sand, off to Valerie’s right. The first few times Kirby had flown down to San Pedro on the Belizean island of Ambergris Caye, 45 miles to the south, to pick up supplies or to be sure Innocent’s check had been deposited into their account (the bank branch in San Pedro is open three mornings a week), Valerie had flown with him, telling herself she needed the change, the opportunity to shop in the hotel boutique, walk around among other people, but in fact she didn’t need any of that at all. The truth was — and she soon realized this — the truth was, if she left the island with Kirby every time he was going somewhere, it meant she was afraid he wouldn’t come back, he’d strand her here. And that meant she didn’t trust him.

And if she didn’t trust him, what was she doing with him?

True, this life was a jolly and an easy one, particularly after all the running around just before they came here, but even more particularly after the total earnestness of her entire life prior to Belize. Thinking of that earlier self, of her earnest minister father and her earnest teacher brother, thinking of her own earnestness in pursuit of the dry joys of archaeology, she found it hard to believe she had spent so much time not being silly.

Not being silly.

What was the name of that book she’d read when she was a kid? Green Mansions. The idea inside that book had been an idea of fun, an idea of adventure and travel and strangeness and beauty, and what had she taken from it? In order to become Rima the bird girl, she had gone to college.

Not that college had been wrong for her, only that college had been wrong to be everything for her. A life circumscribed by the graves of the Mayas and the computers of UCLA is not a full life.

On the other hand, if she had always been too serious, Kirby had never been serious enough. They were good for one another, she felt. He took her out of herself — mm, yes, in several ways — he made her less self-consciously earnest and intense. At the same time, Valerie was leading Kirby slowly into the simpler forms and nearer waters of responsibility, showing him that a life spent in constant flight above the surface of things really isn’t very satisfactory in the long run.

And that was why, about three months ago, she’d said to him one day, “I don’t think I’ll come along to San Pedro this time. I want to do more digging on the other side of the island.” (There were traces of ancient occupation buried over there, bits of rubble that might have been pots, small pieces of charred wood. Toward the end of the Mayan civilization, after their great days of temple building, they had become merchants awhile, sailing their goods up and down the east coasts of Mexico and Central America, with outposts and warehouses on various islands along the way. Had this been one? Valerie was still an archaeologist.) .

Kirby had argued against her staying that first time, but she’d been adamant, and at last he’d agreed, and kissed her, and flown away. She’d watched Cynthia rise above the blue water into the paler blue sky, waggle her wings in farewell and roll away to the south, and she’d had no idea then if he would come back or not. If he did return it would mean he loved her as she loved him, they could trust one another, they were right to be together. And if he never came back, that would at least be a good thing to know.

And if he didn’t come back she was sure that, sooner or later, once again she would be rescued.

But, as it turned out, she was past rescue now; Kirby had come back. Now she traveled with him perhaps one time in three, and mostly only went up in Cynthia for her flying lessons, which progressed slowly but steadily.

Valerie finished the hem, knotted the thread, bit off the end, and put the needle away in the little terracotta incense pot (fake-ancient, a gift from Tommy Watson). Standing, she shook out the skirt, looked at it, decided it was all right, and folded it over her forearm; there was a mirror in the house, she’d try it on there. She was stooping to pick up the incense pot when the buzz first became audible.

Cynthia.

She could always hear the plane some time before she saw it. Staying back in the shade, nevertheless holding one hand out above her eyes, Valerie searched the skies, and there it was, just circling by to come in from the northwest, against the easterly breeze. Cynthia disappeared briefly behind the cocoanut palms, then emerged again, much lower, about to touch down on the sand far to Valerie’s left.

It took airplanes such an amazingly long distance to stop after they’d landed. Still moving quite briskly, Cynthia rolled down the beach past Valerie, who waved, then continued on a while farther, and at last stopped. A brief engine roar, and then the plane turned around and trundled back, wingtips bobbing slightly. Smiling, Valerie started out of the tree shade, when all at once she realized Kirby wasn’t alone. There were other people in the plane.

Oh, dear; and she naked. Quickly she stepped into the skirt and fixed the snaps at its side. There was nothing she could do about her top, and it would just be too silly and childish to run away to the house. Well, she’d just have to pretend everything was perfectly normal.

Kirby had climbed down from the plane and waved to her, and now two people were getting out, a man and a woman. A brave smile on her face — I am not embarrassed at being bare-breasted — Valerie walked down like a proper hostess to greet her guests.

The man and woman were both under 30, and extremely unalike. The woman was a skinny little ash blonde, with dry-looking skin the color of mahogany and a very attractive but tough-looking face. The man was very tall and gawky and pale-skinned, with a layer of soft baby fat all over his body. He was very slightly bucktoothed, and looked eager and naive and innocent and well-intentioned, whereas the woman looked like somebody who’d seen everything and believed nothing.

“Valerie,” Kirby said, grinning, as she arrived, “I’d like you to meet a couple people I just ran into down in San Pedro. Ran into again. This is Tandy; she’s a Texas girl with a rich daddy.”

“How do you do,” Valerie said.

Tandy looked her up and down, taking it all in, the unusually tall girl with the all-over tan and the flowing white skirt, and she shook her head. With a crooked smile, she said, “You win.”

Valerie wasn’t sure what that was — a compliment? — but she knew it was meant in friendly fashion, so she smiled back and said, “I’m glad Kirby brought you.”

“And this is Tandy’s friend—” Kirby began.

“In a manner of speaking,” Tandy said.

“Aw, Tandy,” said the man, grinning and gawking.

“He’s—” Kirby frowned, then leaned toward the man. “I’m sorry, I forgot your name again.”

“Oh! Wull, uh, it’s Albert.”

“Albert, this is Valerie.”

“How do you do?”

“Wull, this is wonderful. You live here, do you? On this island.”

“For now,” Valerie said.

Smiling at Valerie, Kirby said, “You’ll never guess. Albert has a great interest in pre-Columbian art.”

Valerie found herself grinning from ear to ear, enjoying Kirby’s pleasure. “Is that right?” she said.

“Oh, wull, yes. Back in Ventura, I converted the entire west wing to a kind of museum.”

“That sounds wonderful.”

“You must come see it.”

“Maybe we will,” Valerie told him.

“Albert is very interested,” Kirby said, “in Mayan treasures in particular. I thought we might have a nice talk about that.”

“That would be fun,” Valerie said.

Kirby put an arm around her shoulders, saying, “We’ll unload Cynthia later. First I think we ought to go up to the house and settle in and have a drink. Tandy and Albert are gonna stay over, we’ll do a little cookout, then all four of us go back to San Pedro tomorrow, have a nice sit-down restaurant dinner. What do you want? El Tulipan or The Hut?”

“Let me think about it,” Valerie said. I’ll wear this skirt, she thought.

They started up from the beach toward the house. Still with his arm around Valerie’s shoulders, Kirby bent his head and gave her a quizzical look, saying, “Don’t you think you’re overdressed?”

Valerie laughed.