Marguerite again. “We were glad just to have him—”
Colin closed his eyes. “About a year ago, Zaul began selling himself as a poker player. Looking for higher and higher stakes games. Where the buy-ins are five and ten thousand.”
The knot in my stomach worsened.
Colin continued. Uncomfortable. “I’ve had to bail him out.”
Marguerite whispered while not looking up, “Twice.”
Colin continued, “The second time, I told him—” He sliced through the air with his hand level to the ground. “No more.” A pause. “We don’t know how much he owes but…” A shrug.
Marguerite added, “We were trying to set a boundary that we should have set a long time ago.”
“How much?” I asked.
Colin shook his head and shrugged. “I don’t know.” He sat and leaned his head against the wall. “Couple hundred.” Colin shook his head. “Somehow, he knew the location of the drop.” A glance. Shrug. An honest admission that it was our—my—drop. “I guess he figured we could absorb the loss. Blame it on someone else. We’d make it good with the client. Move on. Problem was that whomever he owed money followed him. Surprised him on the dock.” He glanced behind him. “Maria was oblivious, feeding the fish below the boathouse. Found your watch on the steps. Recognized the inscription. Was no doubt wearing it until she could give it to you.”
That meant that whatever we were now in the middle of was far from over. I stared down at Maria and whispered more to myself than anyone else, “Somebody came to collect.”
Colin whispered, “Zaul being Zaul tried to be tough. Fight back. Maria stood in the middle. Bread crumbs in one hand. Your watch in the other.”
Colin nodded and Marguerite laid her head again on the sheets. I walked out into the hall and asked the nurse to roll in a second bed next to Maria’s. When she did, I took Marguerite by the hand, and she climbed up into the bed, slid her right hand across Maria’s bed where she could scratch her arm, and closed her eyes. I spread a blanket across her, and within a minute, she was dozing. I pulled Colin into the corner of the room and waited until his eyes focused on mine. Colin paused and wiped his forehead. He glanced over my shoulder at Maria. “Folks at a neighboring party heard the screaming. Said they found Zaul talking to 911 and carrying his sister to the street where Life Flight picked her up.”
“Where is he now?”
“Both he and the boat have disappeared.” A long stare at Maria’s mummified form. He rubbed the bend in his elbow where the Band-Aid and cotton indicated he’d given blood. “She lost a lot of blood.” Another break. “Shelly spent eight hours…” He trailed off. After a long minute, he said, “Charlie?”
I put my hand on his shoulder.
His voice cracked. “Do something for me?”
“Anything.”
“Find my boy.” He leaned against the wall and stared at the machines monitoring Maria’s condition. “He raided the safe, took the cash and his passport. Two of his three surfboards are missing, and his credit card shows a charge from Delta. He’s on a plane”—he stared at his watch—“to Costa Rica.”
A year ago, Colin bought a summer home in Costa Rica. It cost him two and a half million dollars, but that much money buys a lot more house there than it does in the States. Twelve thousand square feet. Set high up on a bluff overlooking the Pacific. Private beach. Deep-water dock designed to harbor large yachts. Boathouse with several boats. Both the pool and the hot tub had been built with “zero edges” so that they appeared to fall off into the ocean.
They’d spent all of last summer there, and when they’d returned, Colin thought he’d made real headway with Zaul. Colin continued. “Last summer, he met some guys. Surfers. Petty thieves and small-time dealers. They move up and down the coast, country to country, stealing or selling enough to chase bigger and better waves.” He looked at me. “Given the amount of money he’s about to surface with and given the way he spends it, they’ll make him their new best friend, but that’ll only last as long as the money. After that…” Another long pause. “The gangs down there will sniff him out. Then they’ll call me. I don’t think I’ll ever see…” He trailed off.
The sting of Shelly walking away had festered and was growing raw. Looking down on Maria was like pouring lemon juice on that wound. It struck me that the only thing I deeply cared about in this life was lying wrapped in this bed, like a dead pharaoh, with the distinct possibility that she’d never smile again.
I nodded. “I’ll go. Right now.”
Ever the chess player, Colin was always thinking ahead. It’s what made him good at his job. Both jobs. “You should take the Gulfstream.”
Colin owned a G5, which he used solely for his legitimate import business. We never ran drugs on the plane because it was too predictable and because Marguerite and the kids traveled in it. Unlike me, he had never mixed the two. While the plane was faster, I knew once I made it to Central America that finding Zaul would not be easy if he didn’t want to be found, forcing me to move around—possibly country to country—and I could do that a lot better and with more freedom by boat. Finding Zaul would be a problem—and a big one—but convincing him to return would be the bigger problem and that might take some time. He had left for a reason, and my presence didn’t change that. While Colin wanted a speedy resolution, I could be gone months. “The Bertram’s got the range and she’ll fit in better with the culture. Make folks think I’m some guy in midlife crisis chasing marlin or something.”
In the last decade delivering drugs, I’d developed a nagging itch in the back of my head regarding customs and immigration. Too many stamps on your passport—what I call “ins and outs”—and they start getting suspicious. Avoiding it altogether is better, provided you don’t get caught in a country in which you hold no visa. I was pretty sure I could fly out of the United States, but given the events of last night and Shelly’s final words to me regarding Corazón Negro, I wasn’t sure I could get back in without being detained. Maybe imprisoned. I didn’t know what they knew and I didn’t want to assume they didn’t. Also, if Zaul decided to move about, which I thought he would, I’d need to skirt country to country. I wasn’t too sure how much Central American customs communicated with the U.S. DEA, but I had a feeling that checking in with customs every time I stopped in a different country would raise red flags. Water, while slower, was better than air. It also afforded me an escape route.
Colin’s body language told me he had one more thing to say. Despite his success in an illegal world, Colin was not a good bluffer when it came to me. Never had been. He stared out the window, then at Marguerite and finally at Maria. His eyes fell when he looked at me. A single shake of his head. “I told Shelly.” He glanced at me. “Everything. I’m sorr—”
“I know.”
A shake of his head. His eyes watered. “I’m done.” He waved his hand across the room. Across us. “Out.” He moved his hands as if he were washing them. His eyes fell on Maria. “Price is too high.”
I knew the tendency for anyone in a situation like this was to make a rash decision motivated by emotion. Colin and I had made good money selling drugs. Only problem with that theory was that Colin had never been motivated by money. He had plenty. He was motivated by the glamour, glitz, and people with whom it brought him into contact. Colin grew up working his father’s grocery store, wearing an apron and pulling pickles out of the fifty-five-gallon drum by the front door for little old women and their cats. That perspective of himself had never changed. Colin was still the guy in the apron who desperately wanted to show his kids something else and convince his wife he was more than a pickle puller who swept the floors and stocked shelves. He used to tell me that when he was a kid, his hands always smelled like vinegar. To kill the smell, he would soak them in vanilla.
Colin feigned a smile, teared up, and sniffed his hands. “Never did get that smell out.”
I reached into my pocket and handed him my cell phone. It was the string that conn
ected us. No tether? No business. Maria lay twitching beneath the blue light above her. “I’ll call from the boat.”
I kissed Marguerite’s forehead and she pressed her cheek to mine—a silent admission that we were standing in a mess of our own making. I stood over Maria not knowing how long it’d be before I saw her again. I held her small hand. The red-lit oxygen sensor had been taped to her index finger, reminding me of the night we watched E.T.—she had sat in my lap, spilling popcorn. I kissed the gauze covering her forehead and tried to speak but the pain in my heart choked the words out of my throat. I’d done this—I dropped the drugs. Had I not, we wouldn’t be here. No, I’d not loosed the dog, but I had helped feed the evil world into which she’d innocently stumbled. Staring at Maria, the transparency of my life hit me. I had lived divided. Split time between two worlds—one foot in each. And I’d done so with a resigned indifference. The sight of the soaked gauze on Maria’s face told me that the two had bled together.
I kissed her again, wiped my eyes, and disappeared down the hall.
Motoring out of Miami, I got a whiff of dried blood but couldn’t determine the source. I smelled everything. Finally, I separated my watchband from the back of the watch and found a spot caked between the two. I washed it in the saltwater, scrubbing it with soap. It cured the smell but not the stain.
Vanilla would have been better.
CHAPTER SIX
If Marshall and I shared one habit, it was coffee. We were snobs about it. Talking about coffee was the only time I found him remotely human. Somewhere in here, in my search for the absolute best cup of coffee I could find, I clued into the buzzwords “organic,” “single source,” and “fair trade.” Pretty soon, Marshall and I were rattling off the names of farms in Africa and South and Central America in the same way wine people talk about vineyards. We talked about them like we’d been there when, in fact, all we’d done was buy their beans and filter water through them. That changed when Marshall began his own research, and I soon found myself on planes bound for Central America. Marshall had found not only a way to drink great coffee, but to make a dollar. Or two. Or three.
Blame it on our taste buds, but for whatever reason, we both decided that we liked Nicaraguan coffee best. And specifically, Nicaraguan coffee from an area in the northeast center of the country that was rippled with primarily dormant volcanoes. Marshall described it as an “aromatic earthiness.” I described it as the “nectar of God.” Don’t think we were chums or pals participating in blind taste tests. Far from it. I seldom saw Marshall at this point, and I was seeing less and less of his daughter. In truth, I was spent, washed up, and looking for an exit from the machine—an exhausted hamster. Problem is, it’s tough to get off the exercise wheel when it’s spinning so fast.
During this time, I hopped between New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, Alaska, Canada. Mostly oil exploration and mineral rights along with a company that made racing tires for Formula One cars. Marshall had me in a new hotel every night. I was convinced that he’d hired two or three new people to simply manage my schedule and think up stuff for me to do. I was moving so fast that my body arrived in town three days before my soul.
Soon he began routing me through Central America, where research showed that in the several hundred years prior, dozens if not hundreds of eruptions had spewed from the mouths and sides of the volcanoes of the Las Casitas range. Doing so had deposited layer upon layer of rich minerals and nutrients onto the soil’s surface that was found nowhere else on earth. Then, by the simple process of farming, all that flavor found its way to our taste buds through the lives and actions of some very poor subsistence farmers.
I spent six weeks on the back of a motorcycle on the dusty roads of Central America doing reconnaissance on who made what coffee, what made it great, and how it made its way to market. In each new town—Corinto, Chinandega, León—I’d call Amanda and ask her to take the jet and meet me for a long weekend, but Marshall had not only micromanaged my schedule, he’d configured hers as well. And nine times out of ten, Brendan would just happen to walk by Amanda’s office the moment she was talking to me. “Tell the rock star hello.” Uncanny how many times that happened.
Brendan was the best player of us all.
To take my mind off the growing anger and the momentum of the wheel from which I could not escape, I studied the source, the first middleman, the second middleman, the guy who took a percentage of the second middleman’s profits, the police who dipped their fingers just because they could, the politicians who brought in the international distribution company and took a liberal “consulting” fee for their efforts, and finally the shipping company that took what little remained. If I learned anything, it’s that in all my business dealings, I’d never discovered anything more corrupt than the Nicaraguan coffee business and nobody, and I mean nobody, got more screwed than the farmer who grew the beans. On average, Nicaraguan coffee was sold to buyers in the United States and elsewhere for just over two dollars a pound. How much of that did the farmer make? On a good day, about ten cents.
That’s right. A dime.
Then came the day that I happened upon the Cinco Padres Café Compañía.
* * *
Three decades prior, revolution and blood in the streets had solidified an agreement between five farms that, despite their personal differences, knew they had better join hands or what little they had would be ripped from their fingers. So these five fathers with farms of similar size and production, led by a man named Alejandro Santiago Martinez, joined forces and created a company that wielded enough selling leverage to eradicate some of the middleman nonsense. Alejandro owned a sizable plantation on the side of a dormant volcano, which, I later learned, was the single-most sought-after coffee in Nicaragua. Rumor had it that Alejandro, through years of buying, had pieced together his plantation on the mountainside leading down from the lake that had filled the crater atop the volcano. Further, Alejandro had planted hundreds of mango trees along the sides of the mountains, believing there was an intrinsic connection between his coffee and those mango trees—that the taste of one bled into the other and vice versa. I didn’t know if it did or not but I could say beyond a shadow of a doubt that Alejandro’s Mango Café was the best coffee I’d ever had in my life. For once, Marshall agreed with me.
Completely.
* * *
If Marshall had a personal motto, it was “Everything can be bought for a price.” The unspoken half of that motto was “And if you don’t like my price, I’ll manufacture circumstances that will cause you to reconsider its attractiveness.”
Marshall quickly sent me with an offer of ten cents on the dollar. I told Marshall that his price would never fly down here and he told me to remember whose money I was playing with, so I shut my mouth. In an effort to insulate myself from the backlash—because as dumb as I was, I knew enough to know that they might attempt to kill me if I delivered it in person—I contacted an attorney who, for an up-front cash fee, carried the offer to the Cinco Padres while I sat at a café watching the bank entrance from across the street. To no one’s surprise, he entered and exited within the same five minutes, quickly returning with a no and a soiled dress shirt where one of the fathers had thrown his manure-stained boot at him.
No counter. No consideration. No conversation. No nothing.
About what I expected. The five fathers’ farms had been in their families for two and three hundred years, and there was much more at stake here than profit and loss. These folks were tied to the land. It was as much a part of them as their black hair and suntanned skin. Simply put, it wasn’t for sale. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not for any amount of money.
If Marshall had a firm grip on his money, he’d met his match in the actual five fathers, and in Alejandro, their leader. When he reluctantly increased his price to twelve cents on the dollar, they filled up two five-gallon buckets with fresh cow manure. The first they dumped over the attorney’s head. They second they poured inside his car. All of it. An
d it wasn’t the solid, pick-it-up-with-your-hand kind. It was the other kind.
Marshall didn’t take too kindly to this form of non-negotiation, and it didn’t take him long to find the chink in their armor. Through a series of shell companies created for the sole purpose of bankrupting Cinco Padres, Marshall and Pickering and Sons, with Brendan driving the bus and me as their hatchet man, bought the entire year’s production of several South American competitors and then began selling that coffee at a reduced rate to all the buyers of Cinco Padres coffee. Naturally, the five fathers had to follow suit. Wanting to inflict more and greater pain in the shortest amount of time, Marshall bought the bank that the fathers used to finance their operations during lean years. Given the growing losses and their weakening share of the market, their open lines of credit were “reassessed,” and when the dust settled, they were required to put up twice the collateral for half the credit. The result reduced their buying power and hence their profit margin. It also meant that the bank owned more of their land than they did.
To Marshall, Nicaraguan coffee was a passing fancy. Idle thinking that filtered through the smoke-filled air of post-dinner conversations. It occupied his thoughts like golf or poker or the latest and greatest wine in his collection.
Marshall had little—correct that, he had no—regard for what he was doing to the generations of families in his wake. He couldn’t have cared less because they, their lives, and their problems never occurred to him. He was sitting behind a desk in Boston wearing a $10,000 suit and $1,500 dollar shoes, picking out color combinations and textures for his next two-hundred-foot yacht. Their problems never entered his cranium—as was his right given his money. Or so he had convinced himself. In short, if someone else’s life sucked, that was their issue. Not his. Welcome to Earth.