So far, in fact, the great world really wasn’t showing Valerie Greene very much. Yesterday’s encounter with Innocent St. Michael had certainly been enjoyable, but there’d been very little of the romantic in it; the mode of that scene had been mostly comic. And this driver today was as much a washout as (according to him) the road they weren’t taking.
All her hopes now were pinned on the lost Mayan city. It would be there, it must be there, where she and the computers had decreed (and despite the nay-saying of Innocent’s man Vernon), and from the instant of her discovery of it everything in her life would change. Archaeologists would write her respectful letters, asking for details of her methodology. Reporters would gather for news conferences. Governments would take her seriously. She herself would lead the expedition to clear away a millenium of jungle and free the ancient city to thrust its towers once again into the air.
A buzzing sound caused her to lift her head. A small blue-and-white plane was flying by, rather low, not much faster than they, and heading in the same direction. Probably it was actually following the same road, there being very few landmarks in the jungle. Valerie found herself eyeing that plane wistfully, envying whoever was in it, no matter what their purpose or destination. There was romance, soaring above the jungle, sailing through the sunlight.
An airstrip beside the lost city spread its scythed green carpet in her mind, and she smiled after the plane. But then, before it was out of sight, she was recalled to earth by the driver abruptly braking hard, the Land Rover bucking to a stop.
Valerie lowered her gaze and looked around, as the dust of their passage caught up with them, making a gray-tan haze in the air. They had stopped at an intersection, where their oiled gravel “highway” crossed a meandering dirt road. To their right, a small building was covered with tin soft drink signs. “Coca Cola,” said one, and beneath that in Creole, “quench yu tus.”
The driver switched off the engine. In the sudden silence, dust slowly settled. Valerie said, “What’s this?”
“You can get the beer in there,” he said.
“I get the beer?”
Pointing to the left, he said, “Then we take that road. There’s a place to stop and eat down a few miles.”
“In a swamp, no doubt,” she said, becoming irked.
He looked at her with mild surprise but calm willingness: “You wish to eat in a swamp?”
“No, no.” Even sarcasm was lost on this creature. Looking at her map, as an excuse to regain her poise, she said, “I can’t tell where we are.”
“That’s all right,” he said. “I know the way.”
Valerie sighed, realized how inevitable that answer had been. Acknowledging defeat, she opened the attaché case and stowed her map in it, then put the case back in the storage well with her canvas bag. Beer, she thought in fatalistic irritation, as she clambered out of the car. And she might as well get beer for herself, too; this place wouldn’t have white wine.
21
Reunion
Lemuel found the whistle. “Now, this is something!” he said, holding it at arm’s length, staring at it.
Kirby was just as pleased as Lemuel about the discovery. He never prodded his customers, never directed, always permitted them to make their own way across the terrain, and as a result only about half found the whistle. Which was a pity, because it was a beauty.
About eight inches high, made of limestone carved with primitive stone tools, it was the figure of a priest in a high headdress, with arms straight out at his sides and a long skirt over slightly spread feet. A hole bored through from the top of the headdress to the bottom of the skirt between the feet had originally made the whistle, but when Lemuel now tried to blow through it nothing happened. “No, it wouldn’t,” he said, wiping his mouth. “It’s too old.”
“To do what?” Kirby asked, parading his ignorance.
“This is a whistle,” Lemuel explained, his amiability lightly sheathing his condescension. Lemuel was a changed man now that the dread drug dealers were gone. During lunch, over a vodka and tonic, he had reconstructed his academic armor, had got himself back under control, and during the flight out had even discoursed on his few encounters with marijuana, reminiscences occasioned by Kirby having pointed out cultivated fields of the stuff down below, orderly rows of fuzzy light green among the jumbled thousand greens of the jungle.
Lemuel, in fact, had become so thoroughly the academic and the expert that he’d even shown some early indications of skepticism as Kirby had led him up the side of his extravaganza. “Hmmmmm,” he’d said, when he’d come to the shaped building block, and, “Odd this should be out here in plain sight like this.”
“It was farther up when I found it,” Kirby told him. “I did some digging here and there, test-boring for a septic system, and that thing rolled down.”
“Hmmmm,” Lemuel repeated, and when Kirby pointed out the silhouette of temple steps against the sky on the right side of the hill Lemuel had said, slowly, “Possible, possible. Could be a natural formation, or it might mean something.”
But all skepticism had vanished once Lemuel’s foot, in poking into the hillside in search of purchase, had dislodged the whistle. Brushing dirt away, turning it around and around, even trying to blow through it, Lemuel had to know that what he was holding was the real thing.
Real, but not particularly valuable. There were certainly hundreds, possibly thousands of similar whistles legally for sale among antique dealers and curio shops around the world, most of them priced at less than $200. The one Lemuel was turning this way and that way in his hands had most recently sold for $160 U.S.
But value here wasn’t the point. This small artifact was real, it was honest-to-God one thousand and two hundred years old, the lips of priests had encircled that blowhole, the hands of real-life ancient Mayans had held that whistle just as Lemuel was holding it right now. The whistle was legit, and Lemuel had to know it.
He did. “A whistle,” he repeated. “Late Classical Period, I would say, prior to 900 AD.”
“You know a lot more about it than I do,” Kirby assured him.
Lemuel held the whistle up so the little priest faced Kirby, arms spread wide, like an infant recognizing its father. “This would have been used in religious ceremonies,” he explained, and then frowned past Kirby, saying, “What’s that?”
Kirby turned. They were just high enough so they could look over the intervening jungle at the meadow — visibly drier today, by the way — where the plane waited and where now a coiling column of brown dust spread out and away from behind an approaching vehicle. “Hey, wait a minute,” Kirby said.
Lemuel’s nervousness had shot back into existence, and in full flower. Stepping back a pace, his eyes getting rounder and rounder behind his round glasses, he looked from Kirby to the oncoming car and back to Kirby, saying, “What is this? What’s going on here?”
“I don’t know,” Kirby said, “but I’ll damn well find out.” This remote place didn’t get visitors. Below, the vehicle had paused at his plane, but had not stopped, and now came rapidly on, bounding and bumping over the rough dry land, moving at an angle that would take it around to the easier slope, the one Kirby and the Indians used but which he never showed the customers. “You wait here,” Kirby said. “This is my land, goddamit.”
Lemuel’s one sartorial concession to a trek in the wilderness had been to wear Adidas sneakers with his usual gray slacks and pale blue shirt and light cotton sports jacket. Till now, his garb had merely made him look slightly foolish but, with fright blotching his face and agitating his limbs, he looked exactly like the victim in some sadistic tale of a city man strayed among brutes; possibly by Paul Bowles. Staring fixedly at the machete held loosely in Kirby’s right hand, “I demand to know what’s going on,” he cried, spoiling the effect when his voice broke on the word demand.