Текст книги "Water from My Heart"

Автор книги: Charles Martin

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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

Chapter Five

The wind had picked up and created a six-to-eight-foot chop, which made the nighttime crossing challenging and not so fun. I’d done it before but bigger boats handle that better. I left Storied Career in her berth and motored Colin’s sixty-foot Bertram out and into the open water.

As the bow rose and fell through a dark night and the spray from each wave swept across the glass in front of me, I kept one eye on the radar and the other on my rearview mirror. Staring back through the years. Colin and I had crossed some water together.

When the Miami skyline rose into view, the knot in my stomach told me how much the mess I was walking into was going to hurt—and how much was my fault.

*  *  *

Two hours later, I was on the floor of the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at Angel of Mercy Hospital. The room was dark. Quiet. Colin was sitting in a chair, head in his hands. He was wearing what remained of the tuxedo he’d worn the night before. His coat, tie, and cummerbund were gone, and the front of his shirt was stained a deep red where he’d held and carried Maria. His black patent leather shoes were dull and smeared. Marguerite sat in a strapless, flowing gown. She was dozing in a chair next to the bed, resting her head on the sheets, holding Maria’s hand in both of hers. Maria was connected to tubes, and her entire face was bandaged like a mummy except for a small opening where a tube had been inserted in her mouth. Other smaller tubes ran up her nose. An IV dripped over her left shoulder and into her arm. The bandages on her face were partially soaked through. Machines above her head beeped and flashed. She was asleep but her legs, fingers, and toes were twitching slightly. As if she were running.

I put my hand on Colin’s shoulder but he didn’t look up. He just put his hand on mine and shook his head. Marguerite stirred when I laid a blanket across her bare shoulders and then knelt next to her and put my arm around her. She leaned on me, resting her head on my shoulder. Maria lay gently jerking.

Marguerite began to relay the events of the night as two nurses walked in and began gently pulling the gauze off Maria’s face. When they peeled away the soaked cloth, I could not recognize Maria’s swollen and sewn face. The left half of her head had been shaved, and stitches covered the top and back of her head. When the nurses gently lifted Maria’s head, Marguerite covered her mouth and turned away. Colin wanted to hold her but something stopped him. Maria remained unaffected in a medically induced coma.

When finished, the nurses left as quietly as they’d entered. Colin spoke over my shoulder. “After we left you last night, we attended a gala. Fund-raiser. Not gone more than an hour. Zaul had offered—” Colin’s voice trailed off as incredulity set in.

Marguerite spoke from the bed without lifting her head. “We should have known better.”

The dart stung Colin. He swallowed, and he continued, “I don’t know how he found out about the drop.” Colin was telling the truth. One of the signs of his genius was the amount of details, dates, and account numbers, which he kept inside his head—with no paper trail. There were account transfers, but that was easily “laundered” under his legitimate business interests. Regarding our business—the boutique firm, which sold and delivered high-quality cocaine to wealthy and elite members of society—no record existed. “After being so careful for so many years? Maybe…” He trailed off, continuing a moment later. “After we left, he told his sister they were going for a nighttime cruise.” A shrug. “Something we’ve done a hundred times before. How was she to know? She loaded up. Put on her life jacket. They meandered through the canals.”

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 connected 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. And 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.

My role was a bit closer to the tip of the spear. I spent months in Central America, was constantly in communication with the people of Nicaragua, but I never once thought to learn Spanish. Had no intention of learning to communicate with these people. My thinking was, If they want to do business with me, they can learn to speak my language. The only thing I need to know is how to count their money. I’ve got enough to worry about. I dealt with those around me like crumbs on a table. Tasked with selling tons of coffee, I did. At the lowest rate I could obtain and to anyone who would buy it. Retailers loved me because I nearly gave it away. For the Five Fathers, my business method was death by a thousand cuts. I remember walking out onto the porch of my hotel room, propping my feet on the railing, staring out across León, and laughing when I received a report that they were now delivering coffee via horse-drawn cart as they couldn’t afford gas for the trucks. Why? Because it meant I was that much closer to leaving this godforsaken place. When I called in to report, Marshall affectionately referred to me as “The Butcher of Boston” as I was “single-handedly gutting the Cinco Padres.” He could almost taste the beans. I didn’t really care what he called me or what happened to these people, and I didn’t care about their Mango Café or their country.

I knew we had them on the ropes when I heard reports that Alejandro had stopped paying his workers and begun butchering his own cattle, pigs, and chickens to feed them. I did some digging and found out the size of his herds and the number of employees and figured he could last about another month, and then, without food, the people who worked for him—who were fiercely loyal—would have to seek work elsewhere as their children were starving. I was right; after a month, all work stopped, coffee production ceased, and living conditions on his mountain began driving people down and off. To add insult to injury, he was sitting on a fortune of coffee, as the best crop he’d ever planted hung from the bushes waiting to be picked. Staring at his own destruction, he and his wife and daughter and a few family members were single-handedly trying to harvest the crop of coffee in the hope that they could find a buyer. They could not, and it was a futile effort as doing so would have required hundreds of pickers, sorters, and a host of other people to pull it off. Problem was the workers could see the writing on the wall, and they knew that even if they picked and sorted and bagged, it would sit in those bags in their barns because some other company had sabotaged the market and now the bottom had fallen out. The old man would never sell that coffee. And everyone knew that. We all knew it. That had been the goal the entire time. To leave that man sitting in a pile of his own coffee beans.

Because Marshall prized information and always had, I paid a kid on a motorcycle to ride up the mountain and spend a day or two spying. I told him, “I just want to know what he’s doing.” He came back and told me that the old man had not slept in several days and had been working around the clock. News reports circulated of a coming storm. It had started raining and even the family had gone inside. Last he saw the old man, he was kneeling in the dirt, coffee beans sifting through his fingers, crying. He said he’d never seen an old man cry. Said he was screaming at the rain. Pointing his finger. Angry and sad at the same time. He said his daughter had climbed up into a mango tree to watch over him, and when he’d started to cry, she’d come out with a raincoat and put it over his shoulders, kneeling in the mud next to him. I remember laughing, thinking, I bet he wishes he had sold when he had a chance. I also remember thinking, We broke him. We won. And I took satisfaction in that.

Then came Hurricane Carlos.

Marshall could not have orchestrated a better natural disaster. It was as if he had bribed the hurricane because, for some inexplicable reason, it hovered over Nicaragua. For four days it stalled over Central America, and the rain never let up. In that time, Hurricane Carlos dumped over twelve feet of rain. That’s right. Twelve feet. Doing so not only killed whatever crop was currently growing, but it filled up the lake atop a dormant volcano called Las Casitas. Once full, the weight cracked the mantle, causing a miniature eruption and mudslide. The thirty-foot-high, mile-wide mudslide shot off and down the mountain at more than a hundred miles an hour, cutting a thirty-mile swath to the ocean. Naval and Coast Guard vessels would later pick up survivors clinging to debris some sixty miles in the Pacific.

More than three thousand people died. From a sheer production standpoint, they’d been set back twenty to thirty years, not to mention the human toll on families and fatherless children and childless parents. As for the Cinco Padres Coffee Company, four of the five farms sat in the hurricane’s path. Leveled. No more Cinco Padres Café Compañía. The lone padre teetered on the verge of bankruptcy.

*  *  *

I flew home. Rode the elevator to Marshall’s office. My skin tanned from spying in the sun. He gathered us in his office—​Marshall, Brendan, me, a few other guys. He asked my opinion. I told him there was an opportunity. Might take some time, but if he ever wanted a corner on the Central American coffee market, this was it. It struck me as I spoke that Marshall’s attention was elsewhere. His head was aimed at me, but his ears were not. He’d checked out. Which meant he was three steps ahead. Whatever his next move was, he’d made it long ago.

He turned to Brendan. “Brendan?”

Brendan had developed a habit of pretending to shoot an imaginary six-gun when he spoke about stocks or decisions involving money. He’d practiced the whole routine: draw, cock, shoot, blow smoke off the barrel muzzle, and then holster. He thought it made him look like a gunslinger, which became his self-adopted nickname—because he didn’t like “Oz Brown.” Brendan brandished his finger pistol. “It’s a loser. Close up shop. We’ve accomplished what we set out to do.” He blew the smoke off the barrel. “Cut our losses and run.”

The words “We’ve accomplished what we set out to do” echoed in my mind.

That’s when it struck me how perfectly Marshall had played this hand. It was never about the coffee. In the last six months, he’d successfully removed me and inserted Brendan. My limited experience with Brendan told me that Brendan loved Brendan and would sell his soul for Marshall’s money. Which he did. And it didn’t take a genius to realize that while I’d been gone making them money, Brendan had been dating my girlfriend.

*  *  *

Overnight, Marshall called in the loans on the remaining family members of the Cinco Padres. Penniless and coffee-less, they and their families lost everything. The farms were foreclosed on and became the property of the bank. If the hurricane had set that region back two decades, Marshall’s business tactics would set it back five more. Then, like a man who’d slept with the town whore, he took a shower and walked away. As was his right given him by his money.

Entire villages, dependent upon the plantations for work and sustenance, lost everything. And all for what? His money? His daughter? His entertainment? As the bitterness settled in my mouth, I realized it was about none of that. Marshall’s life had one overriding urge—power. And this game he was playing, in which I was imprisoned and little more than a pawn, was how he wielded it.

The following week, I returned to Nicaragua to deliver the papers Marshall and his lawyers had signed and to clean out the hotel room in León, which I’d converted into an office and had served as my home. The night I left, I rode out of town on a rented motorcycle up into the mountains. Until then, I’d spent some time examining warehouses in town where the coffee was stored once it had been harvested, cleaned, and brought to town for sale, but I’d never actually made my way deep into the mountains—onto the plantations—where the coffee was grown. Where the people lived who grew it. Never gotten my hands dirty or talked to a single family working in the plantations. I can’t tell you why I did. I just did.