“So it’s there, in other words,” St. Michael said, when Lemuel was done. “The temple is there.”
“Well, yes, of course.”
St. Michael brooded some more. Did he believe Lemuel? If he didn’t, it was still possible that Lemuel was too unimportant to bother with further. Particularly if Lemuel volunteered to be, to do — what was the legal term for selling out your partners? Oh, yes — to give evidence for the prosecution, that was it. “I’ll be happy, if necessary,” Lemuel said, smiling a bit as man to man, “to give evidence for the prosecution, though of course, with my reputation at stake, I’d prefer to have as little to do with this sorry mess as—”
“Tell me about,” St. Michael interrupted, as though he hadn’t heard Lemuel talking at all, “tell me about, mmmm—” He withdrew a flat white envelope from his inner jacket pocket and consulted something written on its back: “Witcher and Feldspan.”
“Who?”
“Alan Witcher and— Here, see for yourself.”
St. Michael tossed the envelope across the table. It landed face up, and Lemuel had time to see that it was addressed to one Innocent St. Michael at some Belizean government department, and that the printed return address was a bank in the Cayman Islands. But then St. Michaels reached out, turned it over, and tapped the pen notations on the back, saying, “That side.”
“Yes, of course.”
Lemuel drew the envelope closer, to read what was written there: Alan Witchery Gerrold Feldspan, 8 Christopher Street, New York, NY 10014. “Who are these people?”
“That’s what I am asking you, Mister Lemuel. Who are they, and why did they tape-record their conversation with Kirby Galway?”
“But I have no idea, I’ve never heard—”
St. Michael’s big palm boomed down onto the desktop with a crack of doom, so forceful that everything in the room jumped, including Lemuel, who very nearly went over backwards out of his chair. His large round face all thunderclouds, St. Michael roared, “Do not toy with me, Mister Lemuel, or it will go very badly with you, I assure you. You can spend a month in that little cell, if you think you’d like it, if you—”
“No, please!” Lemuel leaned forward, gasping for breath, ribcage pressed against the rough edge of the desk. “I’m telling you the truth! I swear I am! I’ll tell you anything you want, anything you need to know!”
“Tell me about Witcher and Feldspan, then, and stop wasting my time!”
“But I don’t know them! Honest to God, oh, God help me, oh, what am I going to do, I should never have, it’s all Galway’s fault, he kept saying this and saying that, and that girl, I don’t know what she told you, she’s as bad as he is, they’re in it together, I know they—”
“Oh, be quiet,” St. Michael said, all his fury gone as abruptly as it had arrived, like a summer storm. Shaking his head, he said, “You’re telling the truth now, all right. You don’t know any more than you just said.”
“That’s right!”
“So Kirby brings down those pansy boys. And then he brings down you. And he knows Valerie Greene, but he don’t like her so much. And when you see her, you get the wind up, you figure you gonna be arrested for what you planned, stealing our antiquities, you try to run—”
“I never, never had any—”
St. Michael pointed a thick finger at Lemuel. “You come down here, at your expense, because Kirby’s got no money to throw away on strangers, your expense, just to play expert, that’s all it is. You tell that story, Mister Lemuel,” St. Michael said, and smiled a thin and dangerous smile. “You tell that story in a Belize court, Mister Lemuel.”
“It’s the truth,” Lemuel said weakly. But the Belize court loomed in his mind, as foreign as Brobdignag, as implacable as the Inquisition.
“Mister Lemuel,” St. Michael said, “I can arrange to have you released now, send you back to the hotel. You take a shower, calm down, check out like anybody else, get on the plane, go back to the States. You can do that, Mister Lemuel.”
“Oh, thank God,” Lemuel said.
“But, do you know,” St. Michael went on, “do you know what you can’t do, Mister Lemuel?”
“Wha... what?”
“Get within two blocks of the American embassy,” St. Michael said. “That you can’t do. Don’t even think about turning your head in that direction.”
“Oh, I won’t,” Lemuel said, in utter sincerity. “Believe me, Mister St. Michael, I’ve learned my lesson. You’ll never—” His voice broke; he started again: “You’ll never ever hear from me again.”
30
Before the Storm
When the alarm went off, Kirby moaned, thrashed about in the confined space, smacked gummy lips, and reluctantly opened gummy eyes just long enough to find the damn wind-up alarm clock on Cynthia’s dashboard and push in the button to stop the awful noise. His sticky eyelids immediately squeezed shut again, but too late; he had seen the clock face, he knew it was 9:30 tomorrow morning, he knew he was awake.
Hell and damn. The smell of marijuana all about him was hot and dry and pungent. Only a part of the plane was under the tree branches, and the metal fuselage had conducted heat forward from the sun-drenched tail section. He hated to sleep in the plane, anyway; there was never enough room for his long rangy body, and he always awoke stiff and sore, with aches that would take hours to fade. Still reluctant to accept consciousness, pawing in his door pocket for his sunglasses, he looked out and around at this little comer of the world.
The Florida Everglades. East of Cape Romano, south of Fort Myers, the Everglades was a flat and soggy confusion of land, some of it still pristine uncleared swamp, some dry scrub covered with dwarf pines and dusty shrubs, some reclaimed into citrus groves, some dried to grazing land, supporting horses or cattle. Kirby was parked at the narrow end of a long paper-airplane-shaped pasture flanked by bog, hemmed in by gnarled trees. Horses used to graze here, unfenced except at the wide farther end, held in by the swampy footing on both sides, but the land had changed ownership a couple of years ago and now it lay deserted.
Or almost deserted. Three young deer, adolescent males, grazed around Cynthia’s nose, looking up without much interest when Kirby began to move around inside the plane, but then bounding off into the swamp when he opened his door.
A hot day already, and quite humid. The insect repellent he’d put on three and a half hours ago, when he’d landed here in darkness and set the alarm and tried to get caught up on some of his lost sleep, had faded by now, and he had a few nice fresh bites under his eyes and between his knuckles. Itchy, hungry, irritated, weary, aching all over, he clambered awkwardly out of the plane and down onto the faintly spongy ground, where he held one of Cynthia’s struts and did some not-so-very-deep knee bends to limber up.