Ten laps in the pool; rest a while, floating; ten more laps. Meantime, the sun rose higher in the eastern sky, the vault of heaven lightened from charcoal gray through smudged ivory to palest blue, and the St. Michael house began to stir with activity.
It was a large house, though not as large as its model, Monticello. Three stories high, broad, white, pillared, the house stood on a broad knob of hill, facing north. The pool behind the house was in sun all day, though shade trees were handy to both sides. Within the house were Innocent’s wife Francesca and their four daughters: Elizabeth, Margaret, Catherine, and Patricia. All now in their teens, they were a lot of little prigs, raving feminists who utterly disapproved of their father. Well, he had wanted respectability, and the detestation of one’s children was apparently one of the prices to be paid.
The house also contained several servants, one of whom — the stout motherly sort that Francesca preferred — came out as he was finishing his laps. She laid a snowy white terrycloth towel and a clean fluffy terrycloth robe of Virgin Mary blue on one of the wrought iron white chairs beside the pool. “Good morning, sir,” she said to Innocent’s passing churning form in the water, and returned to the house.
Innocent ate with a good appetite, under the censorious glares of Margaret and Patricia, then dressed in seersucker and a wide-collared white shirt, kissed short, fat Francesca goodby, spoke cheerfully to a sullen Catherine, and went whistling to his car, which had been buffed clean since he’d last driven it yesterday. His house, on a private road north of the Western Highway, between the ranches of Beaver Dam and Never Delay, gave ready access to both Belmopan to the west and Belize City to the east. This morning, he turned east.
He listened to the tape for the third time on the drive to Belize, occasionally stopping the recorder, running it back, listening to a sentence again, sometimes listening to one bit several times. For instance, the point early on where Kirby said, “I bought this land as an investment. Good potential for grazing, as you can see.” Good potential for grazing was word for word what Innocent had said to Kirby when selling him that parcel. And what other land did Kirby own? None. So it had to be the same.
But on the other hand, it couldn’t be. Innocent knew damn well what was and wasn’t there, and it didn’t include any goddam Mayan temple. Another sentence he listened to a lot was Feldspan’s, “Look! A paving block! This has been shaped!” Then Kirby says that nonsense about checking with the government — he never had, of course — adding, “everybody said there’s just no Mayan cities or temples or anything at all like that in this area. They said it’s all been studied and checked out, and there’s just nothing here.”
Well, if the conversation were taking place on the land Innocent had sold to Kirby, “everybody” was absolutely right. But Kirby’s statement was immediately followed by Witcher’s breathed, heartfelt, awed, “They’re wrong.”
Then the next bit was also a problem. Feldspan: “What’s the name of this place?” Kirby: “Probably nobody for a thousand years has known the name of this temple. The Indians around here call this hill Lava Sxir Yt.” Then he carefully spelled it.
Lava Sxir Yt? There was no such place. Innocent would have some friends check among the up-country Indians, but he doubted they’d find anything. It was just some goddam exotic-sounding name Kirby had made up, that’s all. His own personal private Shangri-la.
So what were the possibilities here? One: Kirby had found an entire Mayan temple on the land Innocent had sold him, even though Innocent knew every inch of that land and it contained no temple.
Two: Kirby, possibly while flying over the terrain or one time when he landed in the jungle to pick up a load of marijuana, had found an undiscovered Mayan temple, and was lying to his customers, telling them it was his land when it was not.
Three: Kirby and the two pansy-boys were involved in a complex con game — possibly aimed at Innocent himself, but more likely at someone else — in which they just walked around some dumb piece of bush somewhere and read from a script; there was no temple, in other words. (Which would also explain why the pansy-boys had made this infuriating tape in the first place.)
Of the possibilities, Number Two seemed the likeliest, though Number Three also suited what Innocent thought of as Kirby’s character and style. As for Number One, Innocent just found that impossible to believe, but if it were true it raised a fresh problem, and that problem was Valerie Greene.
Let us say, let us just say for argument’s sake, that Innocent St. Michael at one time owned a Mayan temple without noticing the fact. Let us further say that Innocent innocently sold this land to one Kirby Galway, who managed to see something there that Innocent had not. Clearly, with shaped stones and jaguar stelae lying about in plain sight (according to this damn tape), Kirby has done some preliminary excavation here, just enough to see what he’s got.
So, when Valerie Greene, an archaeologist and a girl of undoubted honesty and probity — and a sweet ass, but that’s another story — goes to this land today she will see the temple. This sight will vindicate her theory, which is all well and good for her, but it will also make public the temple. Kirby will no longer be able to rape it at will, and Innocent will no longer have the possibility of cutting himself in on the action.
On the other hand, if he didn’t send somebody to Kirby’s land, there never would be a way to prove or disprove possibility Number One. Besides which, he’d already promised Valerie cooperation; his driver would be picking her up at her hotel this very morning, before Innocent reached the city. Presumably, Innocent could still stop Valerie from going out there this morning, but if he did so it might look bad later, if and when the whole story came out. And Valerie, a determined girl if he was any judge, would manage to get to the site with his cooperation or without.
No, there were other and better ways to deal with the problem, which was one of the reasons Innocent was driving to Belize this morning. His first stop would be at the law office of his good friend, sometime partner, and old crony, Sidney Belfrage, where the preliminary steps would be taken to prove that the original sale of land to Kirby Galway had been invalid; a lawyer with Sidney’s brains and experience would have no trouble finding grounds. No real legal action would be taken as yet, but the first steps would be put in train, so that, if indeed there was a temple on that land, Innocent would be able to demonstrate that he had, in all good faith, been attempting to correct a legal wrong for its own sake, starting when he still thought the land was worthless, before the temple was discovered.
So that was to be his first stop today, but not the only stop, because there was a second problem created by the existence of this tape, and the second problem was the tape. Done by the pansy-boys. Whoever and whatever they turned out to be, and whatever their reason for making the tape, those two would have to be neutralized, wouldn’t they?