Read Westlake, Donald E - Novel 43 for Free Online

moving into murky areas beyond her comprehension, Valerie
said, “Actually, I’m an archaeologist.”
                 He
brightened right up. “Oh! De Mayans!”
                 “That’s
right,” she said, smiling, pleased that he was pleased. “Dat’s me, you know,”
he said, his simple good humor returning. Leaning a bit toward her, smiling, he
patted his chest. “Mayan.” “Oh, really?” She said, “A nzan kayalki hec malanalam.”
                 He
gawped at her, then straightened, returned his hand to the wheel, looked at the
road, looked at her: “What’s dat?”
                 “Kekchi,”
she told him.
                 He
frowned: “You mean, like a song?”
                 It
was her turn to be confused. “A song?”
                 “People
say, ‘Dat song, dat’s catchy.’”
                 “No,
no,” she said, laughing. “It’s the Mayan language ,
the principal Mayan tribal tongue in this area. Kekchi.”
                 “Ohhh,”
he said, getting it. “Indian talk.
No, I’m not, I’m not all Mayan.”
Grinning at her, this time he patted his kinky hair, saying, “Creole. I gotta
lotta Creole, too. Dat’s what I talk. English and Creole.”
                “I see,” she said, not seeing at
all.
                 He
said, “You going out to de ruins, huh? Lamanai, maybe?”
                 “No,”
she said. “Actually, what I’m doing is rather exciting.”
                 He
looked interested, potentially excited, potentially impressed: “Oh, yes?”
                 “I
think,” Valerie said, unconsciously spreading her palms atop the attache case
containing her documents and maps, “I think there is a significantly important
Mayan site that has never been discovered!”
                 “Up
in de jungle, you mean,” he said, and nodded sympathetically. “Oh, it’s very
hard to get up in dere.”
                 “That’s
just it,” she said. “Belize is still so primitive, so largely unmapped—”
                 “Oh,
now, Miss,” he interrupted. “We ain’t
primitive, now. We got movie houses, radio, we gonna get television most
any day—”
                 “No,
I’m sorry,” Valerie said, “I do beg your pardon, I didn’t mean primitive like that. 1 mean so much of the country is
still virgin jungle.”
                 “Virgin,”
he said, as though it too were a Kekchi word. Then he gave her a quick sharp
look and nodded faintly to himself.
                 “What
I did at UCLA,” Valerie explained, “I got the statisticians interested. There
are so many Mayan sites discovered, new ones still being found; what if we did
a statistical analysis of site locations, with dates of original settlement and
final abandonment? Would that show us where new sites should be?”
                 “Oh,
yeah,” the driver said, nodding like a metronome. “Dat’s pretty impressive stuff.”
                 “Well,
we ran it through the computer,” Valerie said, smiling in remembered joy, “with
a lot of other statistical data, too, of course, rainfall and elevation and all
that, and the computer said we were right!”
                 “Smart
computer,” the driver said.
                 “It
showed an area that has been missed by just everybody! So I went to New York—”
                 “It’s
in New York? De Mayans?” The driver had thought he was more or less keeping up,
but this latest turn in the story had thrown him.
                 “No,
no,” Valerie said. “The money’s in
New York.”
                “Lots of money in New York,” the
driver said, grateful to be on solid ground again. “My brudder’s in Brooklyn.
He works for Union Gas.” “Well, I spent almost three months in New