Her expression was extremely enigmatic: “Do you mean I’ve been kidnapped again?”
Feeling a bit uncomfortable, Kirby said, “I was hoping, after I explained the whole thing, you’d sort of see it my way and agree to wait a little while. Not long. I mean, nobody’s pinning your arms down or anything.”
“Mmm,” she said, and folded her arms across her breasts to sort of pat her own biceps.
“It would just be for a day or two,” Kirby assured her.
“Mmm,” she said again, and then she yawned, covering her mouth with her hand. “I’m too tired to think now, Kirby,” she said. Raising her arms over her head, she arched her back and strrrretched. She was, Kirby noticed, very interesting when she stretched. “Lunch was delicious,” she told Estelle lazily, “but it made me so sleepy.”
“That’s good,” Estelle said. “You just sit, I clean up.”
Looking over at Kirby, her eyes round and guileless, Valerie said, “Your little apartment looked so cool and comfortable. Maybe I could just go there and take a nap.”
“Sure,” Kirby said, getting up from the table. “I’ll walk you over.”
She smiled, looking up at him from under her lashes as she rose.
Sex. How about that? If he and Valerie Greene got a little something on together, maybe she’d be more on his side in re Innocent. He had no idea where that idea came from, it was just suddenly there, just sort of popped up into his mind.
He ignored Estelle’s giggle as he escorted Valerie around the comer of the house.
24
Present Imperfect
Saturday morning and Innocent sat in his office in Belmopan, his old self again, playing the telephone like a virtuoso, taking care of business he’d let go all to hell, covering his ass in every conceivable direction, and primarily seeing to it that none of the mud from the Vernon affair would stick to his own voluminous skirts.
Vernon. Who would have guessed? “I trusted that boy,” Innocent muttered aloud, yet even as he said it he knew that wasn’t the really accurate way to describe the situation. Innocent hadn’t exactly trusted Vernon, it wasn’t in Innocent’s character or training to throw something like trust around with a lavish hand, but what he had done was something that had the exact same effect as misplaced trust: he had underestimated Vernon. Patronized him, condescended to him, assumed that Vernon had no importance.
“And all along he was selling me out.”
Selling out his nation, too, of course, but that was secondary. He had betrayed Innocent, which meant Innocent had been unwary enough to get into a position where betrayal was possible. Now, among all the other things he was taking care of today, Innocent was going through Vernon’s desk and correspondence files, seeing what other unpleasant surprises might be in store, while down in Belize City Hospital Vernon was busily spilling what guts he had left, telling everything he knew about everything, naming every name.
“He could hurt me, that boy, if I’m not quick.”
“Talking to yourself, Innocent?”
Innocent looked up, frowning, not liking to believe he was the sort of person who talked to himself, certainly not wanting to be caught at it, and there was Kirby, grinning in the doorway, dressed for flying business in his open-neck shirt and khaki slacks and sturdy boots. “Well, Kirby,” Innocent growled, seeing nothing in that doorway that pleased him, “and what the hell happened to you yesterday?”
“Saved a village,” Kirby told him, grinning. “Went home to rest.”
“And what about Valerie?”
“Here she is.” Kirby stepped into the office then, and Valerie followed, looking happy and healthy and just a bit sheepish.
That son of a gun took her to bed, Innocent thought. There was pain in the thought, but also release. One of the things he’d been trying not to think about ever since Kirby and Valerie and the plane had all flown away yesterday from South Abilene was what he would feel — and what Valerie would feel — the next time they saw one another. The gradual suspicion had been forming inside him that the great life-changing love he had felt for Valerie was perhaps easier to maintain when she was dead or disappeared, a great mythic figure, than when she was an actual flesh-and-blood girl. The epiphany that Kirby had claimed Innocent was having the night before last in South Abilene had been a great shaking and cleansing of his system, long overdue he now believed, but it probably wouldn’t have been possible if Valerie had not been both (1) good, and (2) unobtainable.
So what should their relationship be, now that she was no longer among the missing and he’d already had his apotheosis? To go on being obsessed by her when she was present would be kind of silly, but what was the alternative?
On the other hand, even if she were no longer a goddess on earth but merely a woman, she was still quite an intriguing woman, and that pleasant afternoon spent in Vernon’s house — Vernon! by God, he knows so much! — was something Innocent would not at all mind repeating. Just how long would it take to get used to and bored with this great big tall girl with her happy enjoyments? It would be fun to find out.
But it was not to be. One look at Valerie, and a second look at Kirby, confirmed it, and a moment of sadness and nostalgia and regret passed over Innocent, like the final tremor when you’re getting over the flu. But then it was washed away by a sudden flood of relief: He would not have to follow through on his protestations of love after all. He would not have to behave toward Valerie present as he had sworn he wanted to when she was Valerie absent. He could have his epiphany, and get away with it!
“Well, come on in, you two,” he said, rising from behind his desk, beaming at them, coming all over avuncular. “Looks to me like you’ve buried the hatchet.”
“We straightened out one or two things,” Kirby agreed.
“We talked it all out,” Valerie said, smiling softly, “and we understand one another now.”
“But what we’re here for, Innocent,” Kirby said, “I want to make good on our deal. You already know about Valerie, but I promised to tell you about the temple.”
“Oh, you don’t have to, Kirby,” Innocent said, just as smiling and open and friendly as anything. “What I saw in South Abilene, and talking with Tommy Watson, I’ve got it pretty well figured out by now.”
“Hmm,” said Kirby. He didn’t seem pleased.
“And then the tape, that helped,” Innocent said. “But you haven’t heard the tape, have you?”
“What tape?”
So Innocent got the tape out of the locked desk drawer and put it in the cassette player, and once again those sounds and words filled his office: “This way, gentlemen. Watch out for snakes.” Throk. “The noise keeps them in their holes.”
Valerie just looked bewildered, but Kirby stared at the cassette player as though it were his ancestors’ form of Zotzilaha Chimalman. The words and the sound effects went on, and Kirby just stood there and stared and listened until his own voice said, “Do you know how many people there are in New Jersey?” and that other voice said, “No one I know.”
“Witcher and Feldspan!”
Innocent hit the STOP button. “They recorded every conversation with you, Kirby.”
“Holy Christ! Those two?”
“Never underestimate people,” Innocent said: Vernon.
“But— They’re legitimate antique dealers!”
“That’s right. Doing undercover reporter work for a friend of theirs named Hiram Farley, editor of a big American magazine called Trend. Ever hear of Trend, Kirby?”