Galway!
Lemuel pressed close to the louvered window, looking down. Galway and two men, just finishing their lunch. The other two were hard to make out, at this angle and from this far away, but they were certainly white men, undoubtedly Americans.
The three stood, pushing back their chairs. Galway said something and laughed. All three men wore moustaches; a change in male style that Lemuel had failed to notice just as thoroughly as he’d missed the demise of the bow tie.
What could he make of Galway’s companions? They didn’t look like mobsters out of a George Raft movie, but of course they wouldn’t. These were drug dealers, a new breed of criminal, used to working with huge amounts of cash, trading with rich and influential people. They were dressed a bit flamboyantly, but not too much so, and Lemuel remembered what the man Cruz had said about them being men with a front back in America. Record company producers, perhaps, or with a business in commercial real estate.
Galway shook their hands; first one, then the other. A few more words were exchanged, rather sinister smiles formed under the moustaches, and then Galway left. The other two remained standing a moment longer beside the table, murmuring together, one with his hand on the other’s elbow. Menace seemed to hover about them. They both turned to look out the window, and Lemuel flinched back, suddenly afraid.
Had they seen him?
11
The Warning
What a lot of different positions he likes, Valerie thought as she rested on knees and shoulders and left cheek. If she lifted her head slightly to look down her own length, the parts of Innocent St. Michael that she could see framed by her arched legs dangled comically, but the feelings he was inducing through her body were not comical at all. “Again?” she asked, surprised, and the answer came in a rush.
This time, Innocent joined her, and after a brief spell of intense thrashing they lay beached together on the sheet, companionably side by side, catching their breath. Above, a slowly turning fan made absolutely no difference.
Shortly, Innocent heaved himself up off the bed and padded out of the room. Perspiration slowly drying on her body, Valerie rolled onto her back and stretched, long and luxurious, from her down-pointing left big toe through her happily achy body to her upthrust right wrist, her knuckles brushing the rough stucco wall.
They were in one of the small houses in Belmopan’s sterile residential area. At the restaurant, Innocent had excused himself to make a phone call, then had driven her here in his large green Ford LTD with the icy air conditioning. “I know there’s nobody home,” he’d said. “Belongs to a friend of mine.” The bedroom was small, filled by its double bed, the perimeter cluttered with laundry and books and magazines.
Marcia Ettinger, an older woman at the Royal Museum at Vancouver, had warned her about this, she really had. “You want to be careful,” she’d said. “There’s something that happens to young single women the first time they’re in a really foreign place all by themselves. It’s as though all restraints are gone, none of the rules matter any more, and you find yourself going to bed with the first man who asks you.” Valerie had pooh-poohed that, of course: “I’m my own person,” she’d said. “I make my own decisions.”
Had she made this decision? Smiling, stretching the other way — right toe through arching waist to left wrist — she told herself the decision had been a good one, no matter who had made it. At the very least, she would endorse it.
Innocent came back, water beads sparkling coolly in his hair. He was smiling — he was always smiling, wasn’t he? — and when he sat on the bed he bent over to kiss her left nipple. “What a big girl you are,” he said.
“I was always tall.” She knew her capability for small talk was minimal, and hoped she would improve with time and experience.
Experience.
“Unfortunately,” Innocent said, “we can’t stay here forever.”
“No.” Valerie sat up, looking around. “I suppose the person who lives here will come back after a while.”
“Not with my car in the driveway,” Innocent said.
The encounter suddenly took on an unpleasant public aspect. “I’ll get dressed,” she decided, rising from the bed.
He patted her rump. “Tomorrow morning, very early,” he said, “I’ll have a Land Rover and a driver pick you up at your hotel back in Belize and drive you out to that land you want to see.”
“Thank you.” Sudden doubt, insecurity, awkwardness, made her say, “He — the driver. He won’t know about this, will he?”
Alarmed, concerned, almost shocked, Innocent bounded to his feet with a surprising agility. “Valerie, Valerie!” he cried, holding her elbows, his manner totally serious for the first time since she had met him. “We aren’t enemies! I would never embarrass you, humiliate you!”
“But you tell everybody everything, don’t you?”
Releasing her, he said, “You mean Susie, at the restaurant?” He grinned, relaxing, a happy bear, shaking his head. “When I have lunch there with a businessman,” he said, “or someone from the government, do you think I tell him, a man, ‘I had that waitress?’ What would Susie do to me?”
“Pour your lunch on your head,” Valerie suggested.
Innocent laughed. “You misunderstand Susie,” he said. “She would stick a knife in my neck.”
Valerie believed him. He would preen in front of women, but not in front of other men. It made him somehow more likeable, and at the same time more juvenile. “All right,” she said.
While Valerie visited the tiny rust-spotted bathroom, Innocent dressed and went out to start the car, so that when Valerie was ready to leave she entered a vehicle already well chilled. Innocent got behind the wheel, patted her knee in fond familiarity, and said, “If you can wait half an hour, I’ll drive you back to Belize.”
“But my taxi is waiting.”
“Oh, I already paid him off and sent him away.” Steering toward the clumped government buildings, he said, “Now, tomorrow, you pay good close attention to everything you see, and I’ll be in Belize when you get back.”
“All right.”
Again he patted her knee. “Good rooms at the Fort George,” he said. “Air-conditioned. Very nice.”
12
The Blue Mirror
“Oh, dear,” Gerry said. “Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear.”
Alan had spread the blue trunks and the silver-and red trunks on the bed, side by side, and stood back, knuckles under chin, trying to decide which to wear for their dip in the pool. Now he looked over at Gerry, who was frowning into his open dresser drawer. “Lose something?”
“The recorder was moved.”
“You put it in there yourself,” Alan said, misunderstanding. “I saw you.”
“I put it under the leather vest,” Gerry said. “I very specifically remember doing that, because the black case of the recorder would be less noticeable under black leather.”
Alan, a faint vertical frown line forming between his brows, came over to stand beside Gerry and also look into the open drawer. Both men were naked; in the blue-tinted wide mirror above the dresser they looked like a rather crude parody of Greek temple sculpture. Alan said, “Are you sure?”
“Al-an,” Gerry said, which was what he always said when he felt Alan was insulting his intelligence, which was what he felt rather frequently. “I already told you.”