“They couldn’t be federal agents?”
“No. Federal agents don’t travel with K-Y jelly.”
“Then why are they taping Galway?”
“I don’t know, man. Maybe they’re just afraid they’ll get cheated, they want some kind of record.”
“To go to court with? That?” Pointing at the cassette.
“I got no answer,” the skinny black man said. “Vernon, I got to go.”
“Wait,” Vernon said, jumping to his feet. “It’s St. Michael and Galway, isn’t it? We’re agreed on that, right?”
“Seems that way.”
“They’re in on something together,” Vernon said, “only they don’t trust each other.”
The skinny black man laughed. “Why should they?”
“So St. Michael has you search those guys’ room, and you come up with the tape, and St. Michael gives you the machine, says make a copy.”
“And now I got to go give it to him.”
“I need to hear it again,” Vernon said. “Maybe there’s a clue.”
“To who the guys are? Why they made the tape?”
“Not so much that. Where they were when they made it.”
The skinny black man was surprised. “Galway’s land, isn’t it?”
“No, that’s the goddam point. I’ve been there, with St. Michael, back when he still owned it. There’s nothing there.”
“Maybe it was all overgrown. You know the way those temples get.”
“I’d have seen it,” Vernon insisted. “St. Michael would have seen it. Do you think that man — or me either — do you think we could have walked around on a mountain of gold and jade and precious stones and not know it? Do you think St. Michael’s going to sell that land without he already squeezed it with those big hands of his, just to see what comes out?”
The skinny black man frowned at the cassette player in his hand. “Then I don’t get it,” he said.
“That’s the point,” Vernon said, and then more quietly, as though in a conscious effort to calm himself, “that’s the whole point. Galway goes off like it’s to his own land, but it isn’t. Somewhere up in those mountains, don’t ask me how, maybe he saw something from the air, just lucked on it, who knows, but somewhere up in those goddam fucking mountains Kirby Galway has found a Mayan temple! A brand new undiscovered temple, nobody knows about it!”
“Jesus,” breathed the skinny black man, and looked at the cassette player with new respect. “So that’s the news I’m taking to St. Michael,” he said.
“God damn it, I don’t want that bloated son of a bitch to know!” Vernon stomped around his tiny living room, driven mad by frustration and poverty and greed and spite. Anybody he’d have bitten at that moment would have died.
“An unknown temple,” the skinny black man said. Belizean dollar signs danced in his eyes. “Riches,” he said. “Beyond the dreams of whatchamacallit.”
“Not beyond my dreams,” Vernon assured him. “This is what I hate about this,” he said. “I got to get the goods on St. Michael, I got to expose his corruption and get him thrown out and put in jail and me to replace him. But the closest thing I got to proof right now is that goddam record you’re gonna—”
“Cassette.”
“Record, goddamit!” Vernon’s eyes were big round circles. “But if I get rid of St. Michael by using this temple, then I lose the temple!”
“Ouch,” agreed the skinny black man. “But if we could get there first—”
“That’s just it,” Vernon said, pacing the room, punching his own thighs and shoulders. “Where is the goddam thing?”
15
Warriors and Merchants: a Prelude To Disaster
At night, tall ivory-colored curtains are closed over the dining room windows at the Fort George Hotel, eliminating the featureless, dark, infinite, eternal, perhaps unsettling view of the nighttime sea. The lights are dimmer, the tablecloths are thick and soft, and the chunky waitresses in dark green move silently on the carpeted floor. The room is no more than half full, conversations are muted. Tourists smile at one table, businessmen look serious at another, the occasional solitary traveler reads a magazine while spooning his soup.
Whitman Lemuel looked up from his magazine and his soup when Valerie Greene entered the dining room, and his first lightning-quick thought process, almost too fast for memory, involved a series of rapid vignettes: “We’re both alone. Why don’t we eat together?” “I don’t want to be mysterious, heh, heh, but I really can’t talk about what I’m doing down here in Belize.” “But why is a beautiful woman like you alone in such an out-of-the-way place?” “Oh, my dear, I am sorry, it must have been dreadful for you.” “Don’t cry, here’s my handkerchief.” “I do have some vodka in my room.” There then followed an amber-toned scene, which crumbled and liquefied when, as Valerie followed the hostess past Lemuel to a table in another comer, recognition came.
My God! Her! “Despoliation!” “Unscrupulous museum directors!” He didn’t remember her name, but he was unlikely to forget her face. Or her voice. Slopping soup onto the snowy tablecloth, Lemuel raised his magazine up in front of his face, showing all the world that he was a reader of Harpers.
Unaware that the stir she had caused was anything other than the normal erotic ripple that followed her everywhere and which no longer very much impinged on her conscious attention, Valerie took her seat, glanced toward the draped windows with a slight passing regret for the lack of a sea view — the limitless ocean at night, heaving away, held no terrors for Valerie — accepted the large menu, and answered the hostess’s question with, “Just water, thanks.”
Behind his magazine, Lemuel gulped his vodka sour.
Witcher and Feldspan, arriving then, obediently waited by the lectern for the hostess to finish with Valerie. They glanced around at the lack of imagination displayed in the conversion of this large rectangular room from a warehouse manque to a restaurant, and then Feldspan gasped and whispered, “Alan!”
“What now?”
“It’s him! Behind the magazine!”
“Oh, my Lord,” Witcher said. “You’re right. Don’t look at him!”
“I’m not looking at him. Don’t you look at him.”
Witcher was always the first to recover. “Well, why wouldn’t he eat here?” he said. “He’s staying here, the same as us.”
“But who’s he hiding from?” Feldspan asked. “Surely his type doesn’t actually read Harpers.”
“Well, maybe he does,” Witcher said, becoming a little testy at Feldspan’s nervousness. “He has to read something, doesn’t he? And I really doubt there’s a Drug Dealers Digest published anywhere.”
“Hush!” Feldspan said, because the hostess was approaching, a smile on her face, her arms full of menus.
The hostess led them to a table along the right side wall. She was a good hostess, who didn’t believe in crowding the customers together in one area of the room for the convenience of the help, but who believed in spreading the customers out as much as possible for their own convenience and privacy and enjoyment of their meals. Therefore, once she had placed Witcher and Feldspan, the situation was this:
Among a scattering of other patrons, Witcher and Feldspan were a short way into the room, against the right wall. Lemuel was midway down the room, one table in from the left wall. Valerie was most of the way down the right side, one table in from the side, one back from the non-view. In this triangle, Valerie and Lemuel were seated so as to face one another directly, while Witcher and Feldspan, opposite one another with the wall beside them, were situated out of Valerie’s line of sight but so that Feldspan offered Lemuel a three-quarter profile and Witcher gave him a view of his right ear and the back of his head.