Westlake, Donald E - Novel 43 (29 page)

 
          
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 singlerunway 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,
teeterydooking 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.”

 
          
“And
there’s the Caribbean Sea,” Kirby said, nodding at it.

 
          
“Oh,
look at the sailboat!”

           
Just offshore, a sloop with two
white sails slid peacefully northward. Shading his eyes, Kirby said, “Yeah, I
know that boat. It’s full of sand. ”

 
          
Tandy
looked ready to laugh, just in case there was a joke somewhere inside there.
Kirby looked at her, serious, and said, “No, no fooling. It’s full of sand. On
its way up to one of the construction sites farther up the island.”

 
          
Tandy
frowned. “Where is this sand /rom?” she asked.

 
          
“The
mainland, down below Belize City.”

 
          
Tandy
looked back at the Paradise Hotel: a halTcircle of cabanas and other buildings
on raked white sand. She looked at Kirby again, and her expression now said she
was getting a trifle irritated. “Just why, Kirby,” she asked, “would anybody
haul sand from Belize City to out here?”

 
          
“River
sand,” he explained. “This sand here is coral, it’s powdery, they don’t like to
use it for mixing up cement. So that boat there goes back and forth, usually
brings sand, sometimes gravel. All by saib power, no engines.”

 
          
“How
long does it take?”

 
          
“Five
to six hours out, four to five back. They’ll shovel it out tonight, head back
early in the morning, load it up again when they get to the mainland, lay over
the night, and head back this way day after tomorrow.”

 
          
She
looked out again at the sloop, now beyond them, making better speed than it
looked. “Shit,” she said, “and I thought it was romantic.”

 
          
“It
is romantic,” Kirby said.

 
          
She
thought about that. “I see what you mean,” she said.

 
          
“Just
sailing and sailing,” Kirby said. “A few hours shoveling at each end, that’s
not much of a price to pay.”

 
          
“No
price to pay at all,” she said, sounding bitter. “When all you got to shovel is
sand
.” She knocked back her drink and
looked at him. “How about you, Kirby?” she said. “You romantic?”

 
          
“Very,”
Kirby said, and a hoarse voice shouted, “Tandy?”

 
          
Daddy
was back, with three San Pedrans carrying cardboard cartons. Daddy barked
orders and distributed U.S. greenbacks, while Tandy took Kirby’s glass and her
own and made fresh drinks in the galley. Daddy and the drinks were finished at
the same time, and Tandy made introductions: “Daddy, this is Kirby Galway. I
just picked him up in the bar there.”

 
          
If
that was supposed to be provocative, Daddy ignored it. Sticking his hand out,
staring at Kirby
hard
, he said,
“Darryl Pinding, Senior.”

 
          
“How
do you do, sir?” (It seemed to Kirby that Darryl Pinding, Senior, would enjoy
hearing “sir” just once from a younger man.)

 
          
“I
do fine, Kirby. And yourself?”

 
          
“I
have nothing to complain about,” Kirby told him.

 
          
“Good.
Tandy, did you make me a drink?”

 
          
“I
will now.”

 
          
She
went off to do so, and Darryl Pinding, Senior, gestured at the blue vinyl,
saying, “Sit down, Kirby, take a load off. What business you in?”

 
          
It
was fun talking with Darryl Pinding, Senior. He was a rich man who thought his
money proved he was smart. He knew a lot about three or four things, and
thought that meant he knew everything about everything. He liked to spray his
imperfect knowledge around like a male lion spraying semen. He was a big man in
his 50s, probably a football player in college, now gone very thick but not
particularly soft. Sun, sea, high life, and skin cancer had turned him piebald,
particularly on his broad high forehead, where Kirby counted patches of four
separate shades of color, not counting the liver spots.

 
          
Tandy
grew grumpy when it became clear that Kirby was not going to cut short the
conversation with Daddy. She threatened to leave, then left, while Kirby and
Darryl (they were both on first-name terms now) chatted on.

 
          
It
was established early that strict legality had never been an absolute
prerequisite in Darryl’s life; a plus. Somewhat later it was made clear that
Darryl had
done
a bit of smuggling
for profit in his life—a boat like this, why not?—and had enjoyed the raffish
selfimage as much as the money; another plus. Treading slowly, Kirby
established that Darryl did know something about pre-Columbian artifacts,
though by no means as much as he thought he knew. Darryl also understood
vaguely that the southern governments were trying to stem the flow of
antiquities northward, and he thought they were damn fools and pig-ignorant for
taking such a position; a major plus.

 
          
But
then came the down side: “Let me tell you something, Kirby,” Darryl said four
or five drinks later, hunkering a bit closer on the vinyl. “My son is a faggot.
Do you hear what I’m telling you?” “Uhh, yes.”

 
          
“I
don’t know how it happened. God knows he didn’t have a domineering mother or an
absent father, but there it is. Darryl Junior is gay as a jay.”

 
          
“Ah,”
said Kirby.

 
          
“He’s
an
artist,”
Darryl said, with an angry
sneer in his voice. “Out in San Francisco. Artist. These pre-Columbian things,
statues, all this stuff. You know what it all is?”

 
          
Kirby
looked alert.

 
          
“Art,”
Darryl said. “It’s all art.”