“The drug dealer!”
Oh, dear, oh, dear: Gerry had cried that out, but the mobster had also cried it out, at the same instant, pointing at Gerry, who now said, “But you’re the drug dealer!”
Wide-eyed, the mobster said, “Kirby Galway told me you—”
“Kirby Galway told us you—”
“Gerry, for heaven’s sake, who is it?” Alan called, from deeper in the apartment.
“It’s— It’s— I don’t know!”
“I am Whitman Lemuel,” the ex-mobster was saying, extending his card. “I am assistant curator of the Duluth Museum of Pre-Columbian Art.”
Gerry took the card. He looked at it with a sense that the world was spinning, the entire Earth flipping on its axis. “I don’t understand,” he said.
“I think I’m beginning to,” said Whitman Lemuel. “I was given a real run-around down there in Belize—”
“Oh, so were we!”
“I was told your names, and asked questions about you, by a man named Innocent St. Michael.”
“I’ve never heard of him.”
“Consider yourself lucky.”
“Oh, my God!” Alan cried, putting in an appearance, staring at Whitman Lemuel.
“Alan, Alan, it’s all right,” Gerry said, clutching at Alan’s arm, stopping him from fleeing back to the nearest phone.
“All right? All right?” Alan pointed a trembling finger at Whitman Lemuel. “How can that be all right?”
“Kirby Galway lied to us.”
“To all of us,” Whitman Lemuel said. “After I got back to Duluth, I started to think about things, and it seemed to me maybe I hadn’t entirely understood everything that went on down there.”
Gerry was showing Whitman Lemuel’s card to Alan, saying, “See? Look.” Turning back, he said, “Mister Lemuel, I think we all should sit down and have a talk.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Lemuel said, and came into the apartment.
“Well, for God’s sake,” Alan said, staring at Lemuel’s card.
“And to begin with,” Gerry told their guest, “there’s a cablegram we just got that you will find very interesting reading.”
6
Sand and Sail
The sun rose out of the Caribbean, pouring blue on the black water, lighter blue on the great vaulted dome of sky. The islands awoke, palm trees nodding good morning, all the way from Trinidad and Tobago in the south up to Anguilla and Sint Maarten in the north. The sudden tropic dawn moved westward toward Jamaica and beyond, out over the flexing waters, winking next at the tiny dots of the Cayman Islands. Hundreds of miles of open sea awoke with yawning mouths until the sun reached the great barrier reef along the Central American coast; nearly 200 north/south miles of coral reef and tiny islands called cayes, just offshore from Belize. Hurrying to that coast, in a rush to get inland and raise the great green hulks of the Maya Mountains, the sun met a tiny plane coming the other way.
Kirby yawned, squinted in the sunshine, and settled himself more comfortably at the controls. Dew dried on Cynthia’s wings, removing her jewelry. Eggs and tomato and coffee made themselves comfortable in Kirby’s stomach.
Out ahead was the coast. The sea was shallow between here and the reef, the green water so clear as to be invisible from the air, so that you seemed to look down on an exposed world of sand and grass and coral formations all in shades of gleaming green. Only when you flew very low could the surface of the water be made out, as a kind of pebbled glass through which you studied the airborne ballet lessons of the schools of fish.
At the northern end of the great reef lies Ambergris Caye, largest of the islands, 30 miles long and two blocks wide, containing a dozen small hotels and a little fishing village called San Pedro, with a single-runway airstrip. Kirby rolled in there at 7:45, Cynthia’s shadow landing on the grass swath beside the strip. He parked her with the half dozen one-or two-engine planes already waiting here, checked in at the office shack, and strolled into town, looking for a live one.
Much of Belize’s small tourist industry is centered on Ambergris Caye. Fishing, snorkeling, scuba diving, all are at their best along the barrier reef. The hotel bars boast a mix of local entrepreneurs, sunburned American tourists, tipsily smiling remittance men, crew-cutted British soldiers on R&R, whisky-voiced widows, and pale-eyed leathery people who forgot to go home 30 years ago. There are always a few large private boats from Texas or Louisiana tied up at the hotel piers, and up and down the long skinny island are a scattering of the vacation homes of well-off Americans.
Some of these Americans were in business in a small way in Belize, running tourist hotels or exporting mahogany and rosewood or dealing in real estate or owning farms over on the mainland. Every once in a while, one of them could be persuaded to do a deal in pre-Columbian artifacts.
San Pedro starts early and finishes late. Kirby strolled through the bright morning sun to Ramon’s Reef Resort and had a cup of coffee at the open-air bar with a couple of fishermen; doctors from St. Louis, not in quite the right league. Their guide and boat arrived, they left, and Kirby wandered down the beach to the Hide-A-Way, had an iced tea there — the day was getting hot — and headed back to town. He had lunch at The Hut with a pilot he knew and a real estate man he was just meeting, heard some gossip, told some lies, heard some lies, told some gossip, and went strolling again.
In the bar at the Paradise, north end of town, most elaborate of the cabana-style hotels, he got into conversation with a Texas girl of about 30, whose daddy’s boat was moored at the end of the hotel pier. Three-story-high boat, gleaming white with gold trim, tapering from a wide, comfortable below-deck to a high, teetery-looking bridge. On the stem in golden script was its name and home port: The Laughing Cow, South Padre Island, Tx. “There’s a cheese called that,” Kirby said. “A French cheese, La Vache Qui Rit.”
“It’s Daddy’s favorite cheese spread,” she said. She was an ash blonde, tanned the color of human sacrifice, with something just a little vague in her pale eyes and just a little loose around the edges of her generous mouth. She had the look of someone who wants something but can’t quite remember what it is, or what it’s called. She herself was called Tandy.
Kirby said, “Your daddy named his boat after a cheese? I figured he was a rancher or something.”
“Oh, he is,” Tandy said. “Up home in Texas, we got a big spread. Get it?”
“I guess I do,” Kirby said. “Funny thing, I once named something after that cheese, too. La Vache Qui Rit. Except I spelled it differently.”
“You want to see the boat?”
“Sure.”
They carried their glasses of rum and grapefruit juice across the burning sand and out the weathered pier to The Laughing Cow. It was Daddy that Kirby was most interested in, but he wasn’t aboard right now. “He’s gone ashore to raise some supplies,” she said. In the bar she’d been wearing white shorts and a pale blue polo shirt, but now she put down her drink, stepped out of her clothes, and revealed a dark blue bikini on the kind of body it was designed for. “This is the main cabin,” she said, pointing at the main cabin, picking up her drink again.
Tandy took him through the boat, telling him what every thing was: “That’s the refrigerator,” she’d say, pointing at the refrigerator. “That’s the shower. That’s my bunk.”
They made their way by stages to the bridge, where Tandy finished the tour by pointing at the wheel and saying, “And that’s the wheel.”