Red Jungle (5 page)

“How was the trip,
amigo?”
Mahler asked.

“No problem,” Russell said. He shook hands with both men.

“We’ll start tomorrow,” Mahler said. They were sitting in the living room, which had an incredible view of a garden. There was a giant Olmec head, and three small stone jaguars and a stone lizard, all antiquities found on the plantation over the years and now displayed in the front yard. Don Pinkie had moved out and was staying in the guest house with his wife and children. Russell had agreed to let them stay on until their house in the capital was ready.

“Don’t know how I’ll make the second payment,” Russell said. “You should know that I might not even be able to. I’ll try and see if we can sell the coffee to a broker, but with the price the way it is right now, it won’t be much. So we don’t have much time. The Frenchman will want his place back if we don’t make the second payment on time.” He was nervous about owing so much money.

“I’ll find it,” Mahler said. “Don’t worry, amigo.” Mahler was wearing American army fatigues and dirty boots with red mud trapped in their heavy lugs.

“There’s a hundred and ten acres,” Russell said. The realization of what he’d done and the stupidity of the search crashed in on him. He looked around the poorly-lit living room. As was customary, all the furniture had been included in the price of the plantation. The French family had bought
Tres Rios
just before coffee prices had collapsed; they’d been in Vietnam before that. The descendants of the original Irish family that pioneered the place had been killed during the war, driving over a land mine on their way to church.

“Let’s start right after lunch,” Russell said. “I have to go back to the city day after tomorrow. I want to look with you while I can. Maybe I’ll relax if I start looking.”

“I’ll need money for food and for a few things,” Mahler said. He was sitting in one of those soft mid-century American easy chairs, mustard-colored. He looked tired.

“How much?”

“A thousand Q should do it,” Mahler said.

“Five hundred, partner. I’m not made of money.” The German looked at him and shrugged his shoulders. “Yeah, five-hundred.
Das geht
.”

“If we find this thing, we have to sell it. How do we do that? We can’t exactly take it to London on a plane,” Russell said.

“No, but it’s not illegal either. You own it if you find it on private property. I told you. It’s not like Mexico.”

“Yes, I know. I looked into it. But
how
do we sell it?”

“Carl. He said he’d buy anything we find. You can start with the stuff on the lawn if you want.”

“Carl?”

“Carl Van Diemen. The Dutchman who lives in Antigua,” Mahler said. “How do you think he paid for his big fancy house there?”

Russell had met Carl Van Diemen once. “I know him. I thought his daddy was rich or something,” Russell said.

“His daddy
is
rich, so … why you so pissing?”

“It’s, why are you so pissed,” Russell said.

“Okay, why?”

“I think I just did probably the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” he said. The German started to laugh at him.

A clap of thunder rolled over the house and shook them. Russell started to laugh too. It was crazy. He’d gone crazy. It had finally happened. Russell had heard countless stories about people like him, foreigners who went around the bend. Foreigners who had been here too long. He’d been here three fucking years. That was long enough to go crazy, he supposed. The rain hammered the roof.

“We’re both crazy,” the German said.

“Yeah, but you have a PhD from the University of Düsseldorf—almost,” Russell said, still smiling. The laughing had broken his dark mood. Okay, he was crazy. Okay, he’d just bought a coffee plantation in the middle of nowhere because some German hairball had convinced him that a giant red-jade jaguar worth a fortune was buried on it! He started to laugh again, the kind of laughter he couldn’t remember since he’d been a stock trader in New York, when he’d lost ten million dollars almost overnight. He looked up, holding his sides because they’d started to hurt. Mahler was looking at him very seriously.

“Fran…Fran…Frankfurt,” the German said, dead serious.

“What?”
Russell said. He finally stopped laughing.

“Not Düsseldorf. Fran…Frankfurt,” Mahler said, very seriously.

“No shit! What the fuck difference does it make!” Russell said.

“It
makes
a difference.” Mahler smiled like he’d just found some money lying on the carpet.

“Yeah? Why?”

“Because everyone in Düss… Düsseldorf is a fucking idiot. They couldn’t find an elephant in a coal mine.” And he started to laugh again.

While they were laughing, the girl—the one who had opened the gate for Russell—crossed below in the garden. Mahler turned when he saw Russell looking. He said something in German. Russell didn’t have to speak German to understand what Mahler had said about the girl; it was universal. She was a goddess.

“Okay. Tomorrow we start,” Mahler said, turning back around.

THREE

They say you shot a man,” Montgomery Price said. Isabella’s ex-husband was a tall, blond Protestant from a good San Francisco family, with a fabulous career as an IBM executive in front of him.

He had won an award—in fact, it had been presented to him by J. P. Smith, the grandson of IBM’s founder. It had been the proudest moment of Montgomery’s life. He had sold more mainframe computers than any other salesman on the West Coast. Only the New York office had outsold him.

The award was an important milestone in his career. The day Montgomery won the award, he knew he would have to divorce Isabella. He was smart enough, at 31, to comprehend the extent of his mistake in marrying her. He was still young enough to fix the one thing wrong with his life. He’d simply married the wrong damn woman; it hit him as he went back to his seat, award in hand, and glanced at Isabella who, contrary to his wishes, had worn a mini skirt. (She had bought it in Paris, with her own money.)

Isabella had been a mistake. Some of his colleagues had stared at her. With the right woman by his side, he knew he could work his way into management. There would be no end to the possibilities, his boss had told him . . . but his boss had also suggested that Isabella was
not
an IBM wife. Not even close. She was simply too Latin, too flamboyantly feminine, and too young and sexy.

She made men uncomfortable. She was an embarrassment. She had parties where liquor was served in abundance, parties where she danced and got drunk in public. She had homosexual friends who called other men “honey.” There was a rumor that she used marijuana, which in fact was true.

“Is that true? Did you really shoot someone?” he asked Isabella.

He gave her a peck on the cheek. He thought she looked terrible, and was too thin. Since he’d never been to Guatemala, he had no idea what the place was like, other than the people he’d met—principally his wife’s family. They all seemed to be —over-
everything,
over-emotional, over-wealthy, over-fun loving, and lazy. He didn’t believe any of them ever
really
worked (Protestants of his ilk associated style with the devil and laziness). Isabella didn’t get up until ten in the morning. When she did get up, it was simply to give orders to the maid, Olga, who seemed strangely fond of her mistress, and vice versa. He thought their relationship “unhealthy,” and had told Isabella so.

“Yes,” Isabella said, and turned away. They were standing in a suite in San Francisco’s Clift Hotel, on Geary Street.

“Good God! And the baby was with you?”

Isabella turned for a moment to look at her husband. He was handsome in the way she expected of American men: healthy, tall and strapping. Many of them were a disappointment in bed. Montgomery had been the kind of man who clutched at her, and heaved. Heaving had been his idea of love making. After the disappointment, he would roll over and talk about his office. But it was the heaving that had left her feeling like an animal instead of a wife.

He wasn’t a bad man, and she’d been in love with him because he was what her long stay in the United States had taught her to want—a strapping, well-employed, blue-eyed man who looked like Troy Donahue.

She sat down by the window. Below, she could see Geary Street, and a theater marquee advertising “Man of La Mancha.” She had shot and killed a communist at the gate of her plantation, with her father’s pistol, while Olga, sitting next to her, clutched the baby and screamed. Afterwards she’d driven the three of them to the capital.

“Well, I always said that country was no good. Rotten, isn’t it. I’m certainly glad I never went. It’s in the papers all the time, the war news. Frightening. How can anyone do any business? I’m glad you’re leaving the boy with me. The right thing, of course. . .” Montgomery said. He finally saw the pain in her eyes and stopped talking for a moment, not knowing what to do. “. . . I mean, for everyone concerned.”

“It’s temporary,” Isabella said. “You understand that, Monty.”

“Of course. To be honest with you, I don’t know how Sally will do with Spanish. I think she studied it in high school—or was it French? Does the boy speak
any
English?”

“A little,” Isabella said. She was dying for a drink. Since she’d shot the man, she’d started to drink more.

“Well, we’ll change
that,
” Montgomery said. “Can’t live in today’s world and
not
speak English. Most of my clients from Mexico speak it better than I do!” Monty spoke to her as if she were one of the boys. “You know I’ve gotten a promotion.”

Her ex-husband, in the traditional IBM blue suit and white shirt, went to the opposite end of the suite. It was a suite that her father and grandfather had always used, whenever they were in San Francisco. “Latin America all the way to Punto Del Fuego. Quite a territory for a man my age. Really, I think it was because of you. I suppose they thought I understood the Latin mind.” Monty sat on the orange chintz-upholstered couch, put his hands on his knees, and looked at her as if she might give him an award.
I suppose I do,
he told himself.

She realized he was a fool, and was surprised that she’d never seen that until now.

He’d come during his lunch hour to pick up his son. He had hired a nurse to take the boy home and provide for him until his wedding. He was engaged to a girl who had just graduated from UCLA, who, he told Isabella, would make an excellent mother for the child. He was betting on her the way you might on a horse to win a race. He told people, in fact, that she was going to “go the distance.”

“As soon as things calm down, I’ll take him back,” Isabella said. “You understand. It’s impossible right now with the war, and I have to make the plantation work somehow. It’s all that Roberto and I have. Would you mind if I had a drink? Would you like one?” Her ex-husband shot her a disapproving glance.

“Sorry. It’s a Thursday, and quite early at that. I have one on Saturday night.”

“Well. It must be the time change,” she said, and went to the servi-bar for a gin. She called Olga to get her a glass from the bathroom.

Olga came out from the bedroom. Monty stood up. The two had never said more than “good morning” and “good night.” Monty, for whatever reason, was afraid of Olga— probably because she reminded him of the wild Indians he’d seen in the movies. Olga politely came to Monty’s side, called him
Don Monty,
then turned to get Isabella her glass.

“Does he have everything, Olga?” Montgomery asked. “Clothes and things?” Monty always forgot that Olga spoke no English. He waited for an answer as she walked towards the bedroom.

“Yes. He has his clothes,” Isabella said, looking at the little bottle of gin in her hand. She was afraid of the bottle, and she loved the bottle. It was like most things in her life, a bit of a mystery. When the man had jumped on the jeep to stop her, she had mysteriously fired her father’s gun at him. The barrel of the thing drove into the man’s brown stomach. His rifle slung over his shoulder, he’d never expected a woman to shoot him. But she had: She had shot him well, as the plantation workers said later.

For the workers, Isabella had taken on almost mystical powers after that. They viewed all outsiders—including the guerrillas—as a threat. After the shooting, she got the kind of respect her grandfather and father had enjoyed. The workers believed the Cruzes had magical powers and would protect them from the communists.

“I hope Robert is helping you with the place. Is he still playing polo? Or whatever it is he does all day?”

“They’ve killed all the horses,” she said, cracking open the bottle. “It was quite horrible, really. Seeing them like that in the stalls, dead. Are you sure you wouldn’t like a drink, Monty?” She realized then that Monty was a boy and would never be a man, if being a man meant that you weren’t afraid. He was afraid of everything. He’d been afraid of her in bed. He was afraid of his boss and of his company.