Текст книги "Red Jungle"

Автор книги: Kent Harrington

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“No. Not that,” she said loudly. She didn’t want to hear the BBC or talk of war. She walked towards the living room and stopped by her father’s office door. The door was closed. “Please, Maria, not that. I want to hear Marimba,” Isabella said, holding the doorknob to her father’s study. The music suddenly filled the hallway. Luna De Xelaju. The sound of the marimba, romantic and haunting, filled the house.

“Thank you, Maria,” Isabella said. She took her hand from the doorknob, then touched it again and opened the door to the office. For a moment she saw her dead father standing over his desk, the way he had been when she was a child. He turned and smiled, holding his lemonade and gin, his shirt sweat-stained from having been out all morning walking with the plantation’s administrator, his khaki pants muddy at the cuffs. He wore his never-really-care smile. “Dear, I know you can be brave. You were always brave when you were a girl. The bravest,” her father’s ghost said, and winked at her.

“I don’t know, Papa,” she said aloud. “I really can’t be, not really, I’m a woman. And you know how we are, pretty and all, but not for this sound of guns. Where is Roberto? Where is my brother? We need him; I have a child. A boy.”

“I told you not to marry that American. He was much too dry for you,” her father said, touching his blond mustache. He turned his back to her and looked at something on his desk. “He should be here with you. He should have lived here with us.”

“Could we dance, father? The way we used to. Remember?” she said. He turned around, smiling again, and she saw her father as she had seen him for the last time, and she closed her eyes. She didn’t want to see him like that. She wanted to see her father of 1955. She opened her eyes again and he was there in a tuxedo, looking very fit and handsome and young.

“How’s this? The Italians call this monkey suit a ‘tight.’ Is your mother ready?”

“Yes,” Isabella said.

“Would you like to dance? I’ll tell you all about the party tomorrow when we get back,” her father said.

“And will everyone be there?” Isabella asked.

“Everyone that should be,” her father said, holding out his arms. She stepped into the room and she felt her father’s arms around her shoulders and she was dancing, and he was talking about how they were going to go to the beach at Tilapa when she came back from school in the States for the Easter holiday.

“I want to go to the party, Papa. Please!”

He held her away from him for a moment. “Look, Gloria! See your daughter.”

Isabella turned around, and her mother’s ghost was standing in the doorway in a party dress. Her hair, blonde, was done in the style of her day. Her mother had died in a car crash in Fresno, California, when she’d gone to visit her sister in 1962. She was hit by a traveling salesman from Chicago, who managed to walk away from his brand new Cadillac and ask her if she was all right. She said she thought so, but she died anyway in the ambulance. She spoke to everyone in perfect English until the very end. She had been educated at Columbia University, and she had always prided herself on her English. The last thing she thought about was that she’d left her handbag in the car, and that it was such a silly way to die.

“You have a child now. A child of your own,” her mother said. That was all she said.

The room went still; her parents abandoned her. There was nothing but her father’s empty desk. She went to it and took his revolver from the top drawer; for some reason, he’d always called it “the bottle opener.” She opened the action and saw the bullets neatly seated in their chambers. She snapped the action closed and walked out of the room with it in her right hand, the hand she’d used to play tennis at her school in the United States, where girls didn’t learn to shoot. She’d learned to shoot here, on the plantation. She was different from those blonde girls she’d lived with so long, the Helen Albrights and Madeline Thompsons of the Yankee world. Helen Albright had asked her incredulously if Isabella’s father rode a donkey, like she’d seen in the movies. She said no.

Because Isabella was so beautiful, the other girls respected her. But they were never her friends, not really. She made friends with another Latin girl from Chile, whose parents owned a bank, and who ironically had blonde hair just like the Americans. Once, on a train trip to San Francisco, the two friends listed a hundred things that made them different from the other girls. They never admitted that they were both in love with Jesus Christ, the way young American girls were in love with the Beatles.

I’ll kill anyone that harms my child, Isabella said, and closed the door. She never saw her father’s ghost again, no matter how hard she tried.

She could hear the rain falling as she walked back to the porch, and thought she would have to speak up if her brother called. But he didn’t call that day. He was sleeping with one of his maids, and he couldn’t be bothered to answer the phone. (The maid had heard the phone ringing.) Isabella rang him again anyway, hoping he would answer.

The patio outside was drenched in a warm torrent; the yellow trumpet flowers planted near the kitchen house bent over slowly as they were pelted. Isabella finally gave up trying to reach her brother and walked to the screened-in windows to stand and think of what to do.

Why? she asked herself. Why. Everything when she was a girl had been so good. Her father was here, and her mother, and there was happiness and no war. And if her brother was a tall, irresponsible, charming boy, it made no difference whatsoever. But today it did matter, very much, and she felt so alone.

She had wanted to tell her brother that the guerrillas were seen on the section of the plantation that looked down on the little town of Colomba. She wanted to tell him to come home and help her, because she had the child here and there was no one willing to drive them out to the capital because of what happened to the Asturias family. The Asturiases had all been murdered by the Communists on the lawn of their house, and the bodies were still lying there stiff—first in the sun, later in the rain. No one, not one Indian, no one, would dare drive them out to safety now.

She was alone. Not alone; really; there were 500 people living on the plantation—but she was alone. She felt it now for the first time. She was white, and the rest weren’t.

She played for a moment with her long brown hair, and looked out at the water-bombed patio. She could see the green of the coffee bushes at the end of the silent driveway. She’d ordered the gate locked. She wondered, if she prayed to God, whether her father would appear at the gate at the bottom of the garden and take them somewhere safe in his car.

She saw the pathetic little lock and chain hanging from the gate in the rain. No, praying would not be enough. The fact that God had let her father die seemed cruel and impossible. She had never forgiven God for that. God had sinned against her, she told a priest. He had not answered.

The plantation, one of the largest on the coast, was left to her and her brother and their older sister. It had been bought on a Sunday at a dinner party near Guatepecque, at the home of her grandfather’s mistress, sometime before the turn of the last century. The mistress had arranged the sale. There had always been questions about the propriety of the sale, and about her grandfather’s law practice, which had enriched itself during the flu epidemic of 1898. It was said that her great-grandfather, Ramon Cruz, had started life as a young bank clerk in Guatemala City, the son of poor Spaniards, and finished a very, very wealthy man who could and did shout at the President of the Republic. The story of his rise was, according to some family members, the story of swindles and the shameless abuse of widowed women left alone by the flu epidemic. But no one could be exactly sure, now, how the Cruzes had gotten to own so much. As Isabella’s aunt liked to say, only the dead know that story, and they aren’t in a position to tell it.

TWO

Russell had met Gustav Mahler—the archaeologist, not the musician—when Russell had been sent to interview the young German, who’d become famous after his startling find of a lost Mayan temple at Bakta Halik. Mahler and Russell had agreed to meet at the Circus Bar in Panajachel, on the shores of Lake Atitlan.

Mahler looked like Kid Rock, and had an IQ of one-hundred eighty-three. At times he stuttered. His teachers in Germany thought it was only because he had so many conflicting ideas that came to him all at once. His mind raced; he’d learnt to live with it.

He had been named after the famous German composer, who’d been a distant relative. Mahler’s father was a world-renowned Mesoamerica scholar and an expert on Mayan history. He had worked the Tikal site in Guatemala during the war years and brought his wife and child with him, despite the danger.

While his father worked, Gustav had played in Tikal’s famous grassy courtyard, between the stele Roja and the Temple of the Jaguar Grande. The local Indians had embraced the young boy, and taught him things about the jungle most white people never learn. He was happiest trekking in the bush alone, singing Rolling Stones songs at the top of his voice. He had wanted to be an archaeologist since he was six years old.

Mahler was only twenty-four when he made the discovery that made him famous. He’d gone out into the jungle and found it without any help or university backing. He told Russell that he’d come to Guatemala to write his Ph.D. thesis, but ran out of money. It was unheard of.

The temple had been full of priceless Mayan antiquities. Mahler had saved them from a group of colonels, who’d planned to clean the temple out as soon as they’d caught wind of his find. He’d gone to the world press, sounded the alarm, and stopped them. The Colonels had been arrested. Mahler’s picture was printed in all the German newspapers, who called him a hero. Stanford University had offered him a teaching job in California, but he’d turned it down.

Mahler had brought a Dutch girl to the interview. She was a brainy, thin, glasses-wearing, twenty-five year old from a small country town, who seemed to be a bona fide sex addict. “She just vants to suck my dick and smoke weed,” Mahler told Russell matter-of-factly. “You’ve heard of the Red Jaguar?” he asked.

“No,” Russell said over the music, watching the Dutch girl, braless and fetching, stop to talk to friends at another table.

“It’s out there. I’m sure of it. It’s not a myth, like some people say,” Mahler told him. “It’s worth a fortune. My father told me about it when I was just a kid. He looked for it, but never found it.”

Russell glanced at the bemused Dutch girl as she headed back to their table. Someone at the bar had bought her a brandy, and she was holding it in both hands. Her skin was golden from sunning herself at the hotel pool all day.

“You’d have to give it up to the government,” Russell said. “If you did find any kind of treasure.”

“Not, not … if you find it on private property,” Mahler told him quickly. He looked Russell in the eye. Russell realized that Mahler stuttered, but controlled the affliction through force of sheer willpower. The German’s face contorted a little with the effort to control his tongue. There was a mean look in Mahler’s eye as he struggled to get the next word out of his mouth. Russell decided, looking at him, that Mahler was probably as arrogant as he was brilliant.

“Okay, I’m game. What is it then, this Red Jaguar?” Russell said.

“A… A…great bloody piece of red jade. I mean bloody big. Heroic. You know what that means? Right?” Mahler asked. He took a drink of his wine, the flamenco trio on the bar’s tiny stage playing louder now.

“Life size. Right?” Russell said, speaking up over the music.

“Might be bigger,” Mahler said, putting down his glass. “Might be like the stone jaguars at Bakta Halik. Remember? There at the entrance. You’ve been there, haven’t you? Those are eight feet high, man!”

“Yes. I’ve seen them,” Russell said.

The Dutch girl came back and sat on Mahler’s lap. In the lamplight, Russell could see her breasts clearly through her sheer cotton blouse.

“Big,” the German said, ignoring her. “Could be very big. And those are stone. The Red Jaguar, they say, is made of jade. That’s the story, anyway, what the Mayan texts say. Can you imagine what that would be worth to a collector? Or a museum? Millions! Millions, my friend!” The German reached over and hit Russell on the shoulder, managing to keep the girl on his knee.

“It might be a myth. You know, like El Dorado,” Russell said, trying not to stare at the girl’s tits, not taking him seriously. “Or the Lost Dutchman’s mine.”

The band stopped.

“I don’t think so,” Mahler said quickly. He touched the girl’s cheek with the back of his hand and smiled at her, as if he already had sold the thing and had the bank book in his pocket. She got off his knee, but not before grinding a little.

“Jaguars are frightening,” she said, getting up and moving to her own chair. “I bought a mask in Chi Chi, but I had to give it away. So dark!” She looked around to see if she had any more friends in the bar. She growled, a little drunk. She produced a joint, and they went out onto the street to smoke it.

“What are you suggesting?” Russell said. Holding the last of the joint, he offered the last hit to Mahler, who shook his head. Russell threw the roach in the gutter. The Dutch girl was window-shopping further up the street. Russell could see her outline in the moonlight. He felt very high from the joint and the wine he’d been drinking. It seemed to hit him all at once.

“I’m suggesting you throw in with me,” Mahler said. His eyes glowed behind the roach’s ember as it raced past his face and fell in the gutter.

Mahler told him he thought the Red Jaguar might be on a plantation that bordered the site at Bakta Halik. He said the plantation was up for sale because of the coffee crisis. “That’s my suggestion. I have no money to buy the place.” Mahler said.

A week later, for no good reason, Russell had decided to do it, to throw in with Mahler and search for the Red Jaguar. Sometimes, he thought, you do things and you don’t even know why. He was just stumbling through life, and couldn’t stop himself.

In the late afternoon, Russell pulled up in front of a formidable steel gate. Wind whipped at the ragged banana trees along the road to the plantation’s main house, their broad green leaves writhing wildly. His windshield wipers couldn’t keep up with the torrents of rain.

After eighteen miles of horrible dirt roads and a filthy rain, he’d found Tres Rios. He’d made only one mistake, and it had cost an extra hour. An ancient faded sign read, Finca Tres Rios Familia O’Reilly.

The plantation house stood a football field or more away, behind the locked gate. He could see that the house was big and very old. If not grand, it was still impressive-looking. It had been built with a very deep veranda on the main floor, and had a stick Victorian façade that belonged to another century.

He honked his horn, giving it a long blast as the Frenchman had instructed. He had been told to wait; someone would let him in.

A young girl in a bright yellow dress, maybe eighteen, darted out of one of the shacks on the road above. Her hair was rain-wet, very long, and very black. She ran towards him like a deer in the forest, beautiful in the rain. Russell got out of the jeep and met her at the gate.

He glanced at an abandoned guard shack to the right. The rain was pouring through a hole in its roof. The girl smiled at him, her beautiful face wet. She had big eyes, the whites startling like snow in the jungle. Thin and tall, her waist was flat against her dress. He offered to help her and reached for the key, the rain pelting him hard in the face, but she didn’t give it to him.

“No, yo lo abro, Señor,” she said, and bent down to unlock the gate, her yellow dress soaked. It clung to her back and shoulders like a skin. She unlocked the gate, then stood up, managing a smile. The gate, she told him, was too heavy for one person to move. He helped her pick up the steel pole, and they walked it back across the driveway. The entrance to the plantation clear, they set the pole on the ground and ran back to his jeep. Russell picked the shot gun shells off the seat so she could sit down.

“Thank you,” he said, looking at the girl once the doors were closed. He was struck by her beauty. He couldn’t help but notice the way the water pearled on her face.

They heard a thunderclap. It rolled the way it does there on the coast, forever, and then broke hard in parts, as if the sky were cracking apart. She was a stunner, the kind of girl you see on magazine covers in America.

He leaned back in the seat, wiped his face, and put the jeep in gear. They passed through the gate and went up the dirt road towards the big house.

“Aquí, por favor,” she said suddenly. He stopped the car. “I’ll leave it open,” she said in Spanish, nodding towards the gate. She glanced quickly at him once, their eyes meeting, then opened the door and jumped out. He watched her disappear into one of the wood shacks, its low corrugated metal roof a deep orange-red. The doorway of the shack was black, like her hair. He looked down at the wet empty seat where she’d sat, then drove on toward the big house.

The road turned and moved up the hill as it passed other shacks, some abandoned. Mahler had told him that the plantation was barely being worked, since the collapse of coffee prices.

Another long peal of thunder rolled over him. He saw Mahler’s old blue Toyota Land Cruiser, with its ladder and steel baggage-rack welded to the top, parked in front of the big house. The top of the old Land Cruiser was covered with netting and blue plastic. Russell parked alongside it.

A maid appeared on the veranda, came down the steps with a large golf-style umbrella, and ran to his side of the jeep. Russell saw a tall white man, the Frenchman called Don Pinkie, come out onto the veranda. The Frenchman stood on the porch, a solid curtain of rain between them. Russell stepped out of his car, the thunder breaking again, and ducked under the maid’s umbrella.

“Buenos tardes, Patron,” the maid said to him. She must have heard that he was there to buy the place. He had the first payment in his wallet, a cashier’s check for thirty-thousand dollars drawn on his account in the States. He’d sold everything he’d had left back in the Bay Area: a few landscape paintings he’d collected when he’d been a stock trader, a ski boat he’d kept in storage. He’d maxed out his credit cards too, but he’d gotten the first payment together.

The word patron slapped him in the face. Always before when he’d heard “patron,” it was addressed to some rich Guatemalan. The expression had always embarrassed him a little.

“Thank you,” he said. He and the maid moved quickly toward Don Pinkie standing on the porch. As Russell went up the stairs, still under the umbrella, he saw Mahler come out of the house. The two men spoke in French and then Mahler turned toward Russell and smiled, his narrow face white and cold-looking.

“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.