“We’d have to leave early tomorrow,” she said.

“I don’t mind,” he said, but he was lying; he would have just as soon stayed in bed and screwed all morning.

“You can stay at my place,” she said. “Tonight. That way you don’t have to get up so early . . . it will be a lot easier.” It was the invitation he’d been hoping for.

“Sure,” he said. “Okay.”

Mahler appeared with a drink in his hand. When he saw Russell, he took him further out into the garden, and they sat on the edge of the fountain. Mahler gave him a report on Tres Rios, and Russell listened carefully. They’d only been able to survey the river on horseback before Russell had to go back to work.

They smoked a joint together. As he spoke about the work, Mahler’s blue eyes were intense, the fountain’s light catching them. Russell listened to Mahler talk about east of the river, Amargo. It was exciting and it was dangerous because he was working alone, he said. They had to keep the search a secret or they would run the risk of losing out to others, Mahler told him.

Russell agreed. He tossed the roach into the fountain and looked around the garden. The whole place seemed straight out of some MTV video.

“If something happens out there in the bush when you’re alone, you’re fucked,” Russell said.

“I’m blessed. Nothing ever happens to me. Let’s go talk to Carl before he gets too busy buggering some choir boy,” Mahler said. They went, and found Van Diemen talking to some girls. Carl took them into the house, to a library full of Mayan antiquities. The room had green leather club couches and dark red walls. Mayan statues and Olmec heads rested on a huge mahogany coffee table, along with a few tiny solid gold figurines. Mahler whistled out loud as they walked in.

“I’m so glad we can do business,” Carl said. “I mean, I buy the Jaguar. If you guys find it. I buy it. We get rich.” Carl smiled and looked at them happily. He was a little drunk.

“You’re already rich,” Mahler said, looking at the stuff on the coffee table.

“Great,” Russell said, impressed.

Mahler crossed the room, picked up a huge black obsidian knife from the bookcase, ran it across his throat, and smiled. “Fucking Mayans,” he said.

“You’ll buy all that stuff in the garden at Tres Rios? I need the money,” Russell said.

“Yes, of course. I buy all of it. Don’t worry . . . just find the Jaguar,” Carl said, watching Mahler.

Mahler tossed the knife on the couch. It was a heavy knife, and bounced. Carl picked it up and put it back on the shelf. Mahler was jealous of Carl, it was obvious, and it suddenly made Russell uncomfortable.

He went back outside to Katherine. She’d been looking for him, standing on the edge of the garden in one of the corridors, young men and women dancing behind her in the yellow light, swaying to the trance music that someone had turned back on.

Katherine had a Snoopy doll on her bed. He threw it off, and she got them something to drink. Some men had tried to stop their car on the way out of Antigua. She’d driven through them, not willing to stop and find out what they wanted. Shots had been fired. She was still upset, but was pretending not to be, he thought. They’d barely spoken on the way back into the city.

She lay down next to him, and he felt her shake. It was like a cat shakes when it’s scared. Later, they made love between the fresh cold sheets of her bed.

SEVEN

The general’s wife is very, very beautiful. I’ll warn you,” Katherine said suddenly. “And everyone thinks she’s crazy. She’s not like anyone I’ve ever met. All the guys I’ve brought up to work on the project can’t stop talking about her. I suppose you won’t be any different . . . guys are so predictable.”

On the drive towards the coast they’d passed some of the country’s biggest and oldest coffee plantations: La Bella, La Sultana, La Gloria, some obviously still grand and managing to keep going, others forlorn and abandoned because of the coffee crisis. The temperature cooled as they went higher into the mountains near Mexico. At times the dirt road was lonely and terribly rutted; at others it was well graded and busy with workers from a nearby plantation. Some plantations were so massive they’d spawned small towns outside their gates.

“I feel like going home to the States for a visit,” she said. “You just like to feel really safe once and a while. Go to Nordstrom, that kind of stuff.”

“So have you met General Selva?” he asked, changing the subject. He didn’t want to say the obvious, that even home wasn’t really safe any more, but he thought it would be mean to remind her of that.

“Yes. He’s very nice in his way. He’s been very kind to me and the volunteers, anyway.”

“Selva is head of Guatemalan intelligence,” Russell said.

“I know.” She turned and gave him a fey look. “I think that’s why he’s hosting the project. He wants to convince Time magazine he’s not a monster. It makes him look like a liberal, having his picture taken with people like me,” she said. “He’s a committed free trading globalist, Russell—just like you!” She smiled at him.

An hour after they turned off the asphalt, they arrived at the general’s plantation. Haggard-looking dogs ran out from shabby workers’ housing to confront them. Pretty young Indian mothers, some very young, could be seen inside their shacks sitting by the doorway, some making tortillas on wood burning stoves. Small refrigerators peeked white through shack walls. They caught glimpses of flimsy television sets, even once a glimpse of Jennifer Aniston on the familiar set of Friends.

Men, unemployed because of the crisis, sat in groups in front of the company store, some holding machetes. Here and there banana trees grew out of the mud, exotic-looking.

“How many families live here?” Russell asked as they drove past the store. Some of the older men waved at Katherine.

“Maybe three hundred. We did a census, but it was difficult to get a hard number because so many people here are extended family, or have family that are just passing through. But basically there are three hundred, a little more,” she said. “With the crisis, half of them are unemployed.”

There was something sentient about the red clay ground. It was almost the exact color of the people’s skin, so that it looked as if God had simply shaped the people from the clay earth and blown life into them, and suddenly they were drinking Coke and playing soccer and having babies and smiling at you. A little girl, held by her mother, waved at them from the doorway. Russell lifted his hand and waved back.

Standing in dirty clothes at the corner of the building site in the hot sun, Russell watched the college kids, mostly from Europe and Canada, work with joy on their faces. He was quiet and found it hard to share in their excitement. Despite his age, he didn’t feel young any more. The others were sure they were changing the world, one little building at a time. He saw the project instead for what it was, a public relations stunt. It made him feel jaded. He wanted to believe that building new houses on the deck of an economic Titanic was worthwhile, but couldn’t. He wondered now if he wasn’t suffering from what he’d seen in other foreigners who’d stayed in the country too long: that strange malaise, a spiritual bankruptcy that overwhelmed them.

He was mixing concrete on a piece of plywood. It was a job that even he could do, as he had no building skills whatsoever. He simply added water from a hose and mixed the concrete with a shovel to a cake batter consistency. He hadn’t even known how to do that, until a young girl from Paris showed him exactly how. She was all business, tearing open the concrete sacks and showing him how much water to add. He mixed carefully now, following her instructions, while others came with buckets and took the concrete away to pour in the forms that had been dug and built by a previous crew the weekend before.