The journalists at last had finished their breakfasts, were rising. Vernon put a piece of papaya in his mouth, but couldn’t chew it. The fruit was cool at first, but warmed slowly in his mouth.
The correspondents streamed by, talking at one another. The American photojournalist named Tom stopped to say, “Give us ten minutes and we’ll be ready.”
“Mm,” Vernon said, nodding his head with the papaya in it.
“Your vehicle’s out front?”
“Mm.” More nodding.
“See you there.”
“Mm.”
Scottie went by with the extra man, the editor from Trend named Hiram Farley. Scottie was saying, “Tell me now, Hiram, old son, we’ve known each other all these many hours, what do you think of me, eh? Eh?”
Farley, with a judicious expression, said, “I would describe you as tiresomely witty.”
“By God, that’s succinct! Don’t pay by the word over on Trend, I’ll bet!” Scottie said, and clapped Farley on the back with a sound like a gunshot. Vernon blinked, and swallowed his papaya.
18
The Harmonica Player
The letter read:
Hiram,
You’ve gone away, you bad boy, without telling us a thing, and now we have this very interesting cable from Kirby Galway, which we’ve enclosed. Well, of course we cabled him right back that the answer is yes, and we’re on our way to sunny Flo at this very mo, with cassettes. And this time, believe us, nothing will go wrong. We may even get some actual Mayan treasures for you to photograph, wouldn’t you like that? We’ll be home by Monday, so call us as soon as you return from wherever you’ve gadded, and we’ll certainly have good news for the old newshound.
Love and kisses,
“A very dry Tanqueray Gibson on the rocks, please,” Gerry said.
“Gerry,” Alan said warningly.
“Just one,” Gerry said.
The stewardess said, “I think the only gin we have is Gordon’s.”
“Oh, well,” Gerry said. “All right, I suppose.”
“So that’s one martini,” the stewardess said.
“Gibson.”
“The onions didn’t come aboard this trip.”
“Oh, well. All right, I suppose.” Sadly, Gerry turned away and gazed out at cloudtops; they looked dirty.
“Sir?” the stew said, turning her acrylic attention on Alan, in the middle seat.
“The same,” Alan said. “Whatever it was.”
With a thin smile, the stew turned to the curator from Duluth, Whitman Lemuel, in the aisle seat: “Sir?”
“A Bloody Mary.”
The stew beamed her appreciation at a man who understood airline drinking, and turned away. Shortly she turned back, the tray tables were lowered to a position just above knees, drinks were exchanged for cash, and they were left in peace, each in his own narrow pocket in the egg carton flying them Floridaward.
Lemuel raised his glass of red foulness: “Confusion to our enemies.”
“Oh, my, yes,” said Gerry.
“I’ll drink to that,” said Alan, and they did, and Alan made a face. “Swill,” he said.
“Better than nothing,” Gerry told him, and took another tiny sip of his own drink.
The truth was — and Gerry would go to his grave without revealing this to anyone — the truth was, Gerry had no real sensitivity to the tastes of alcohol. If something were really very sweet, like Kahlua, or very bitter, like Campari, he could tell the difference, but in the range of gin drinks and vodka drinks and all of that he was very little aware of distinctions of taste, so this prepackaged martini here with the defrosted pimento olive was about the same to him as the finest ever Tanqueray Gibson on the rocks which a superb Upper East Side bartender would have prepared without even slightly bruising the gin. But one was expected to know the right things to drink, and appreciate them, and so on, and one of the ways to show that sort of sophistication was to say, “A very dry Tanqueray Gibson on the rocks, please,” so that’s what Gerry said whenever the subject came up, and everything worked out fine.
He wondered sometimes if Alan really knew or cared about the distinctions in booze. Impossible to ask, of course.
As for Whitman Lemuel and his Bloody Mary, there must be something so liberating about being a provincial, not having to keep up a front of sophistication.
What an odd alliance theirs was, after all. Brought together inadvertently by Kirby Galway, they’d had just scads of lies and deliberate confusions to clear out of the way before they could begin to understand one another, but then they’d realized at once what a golden opportunity lay before them. From what Lemuel had said about his encounter with the apparently quite frightening Innocent St. Michael, it wasn’t Galway after all who’d stolen the tapes, so they were probably safe in going ahead with the original arrangements. As for the legality, morality, all that, Lemuel had explained to them at passionate length that it was practically their duty to buy Kirby Galway’s loot and see it got proper homes in the United States among people of refinement and taste, people who could appreciate and preserve such irreplaceable treasures.
Much better than playing Woodward and Bernstein for Hiram. And more profitable, too.
Gerry had been rather surprised and thoroughly delighted when the conversation with Lemuel had shown that Alan also was more than ready to forget Trend and actually deal with Galway.
But cautiously, cautiously. That Galway had been engaging to deal with both of them, behind one another’s backs, and undoubtedly planned later to use each other’s existence to create a bidding situation for the more valuable pieces, showed the sort of slippery customer he was, as if they needed any further proof. Besides which, there was surely still more to the goings-on in Belize than any of them knew. Who could guess what intricacies, what wheels within wheels, might exist even further below the surface?
That was why they’d left that letter for Hiram; in case there was any trouble at all with the law — an idea that made Gerry’s heart flutter in his breast — the letter and the cable would prove that Gerry and Alan had had no intention of actually becoming accomplices of smugglers. On the other hand, if everything went well, Lemuel would take away the first shipment from Galway, Alan and Gerry would arrange to pick up the second shipment and then return to New York, and when they next saw Hiram they would tell him Galway had never shown up and they’d decided to abandon the whole project.
How oddly things worked out. But that, Gerry thought with some self-satisfaction as he sipped his premixed Gordon’s martini, is another mark of sophistication: the ability to deal with truly complex patterns, whether in art or in life. A simpler person like Whitman Lemuel, for instance, no matter how dedicated he might be to the preservation of pre-Columbian artifacts, was still essentially—