He must be seventy or even older, Russell thought, watching him run towards the door. He was spry, though. The old man came into the bar and, seeing Russell, approached him with a decrepit bonhomie that was common out here when finding a fellow American who might be better off than oneself. The shoulders of his worn cowboy shirt were stained dark from the rain.
“I don’t care what kind of beer… anything wet. Tres Rios. It’s impossible trying to find it, if you’ve never been up there.
No signs. Nothing to go by. You should get some quality coffee
out of a place like that. You said you were going to buy it?”
“Yes,” Russell said.
“Wow. That takes guts, with coffee not worth shit right now.” The old American looked at Russell from ancient, keen eyes. “Don’ pay too much, that’s all,” the old man said, after they exchanged handshakes. “You can call me Coffee Pete.”
Russell signaled the bartender and ordered him the beer he’d asked for.
“I know the way all right. Don’t worry, I can save you a lot of time, I spent years out near Tres Rios chicken farming,” the old man said. The American’s blue eyes darted around the barroom, landing on a young bar girl in a red tank top and white short shorts, sitting alone.
Russell didn’t ask the old man his connection to the Frenchman who owned the plantation he was going to buy. He didn’t really care if there was one.
“You should listen to me, son,” Coffee Pete said. “Get out of this damn country while you’re still young. Hell! Better places than this backwater. Why don’t you go to New York?”
“I was there,” Russell said.
“No shit. Girls there all had good jobs and big tits — when I was there, anyway.”
Coffee Pete managed to smile and flirt with the young girl halfway across the barroom. “Don’t be like me. I can’t leave now.” The old American was tall, wore dirty khaki pants, and had a short-barreled .45 shoved into an expensive-looking quick draw holster on his right side. The side arm was the only clean-looking thing on him.
He claimed he’d come to Guatemala to train the Cubans for the Bay of Pigs invasion for the CIA and decided to stay on. Russell could see he’d been big and strong and proud once. He was diffident now, not proud anymore, but still dangerous, Russell thought. Maybe it was even true about the Bay of Pigs. But one heard so much bullshit in these bars.
“I guess you can pay me now. Three hundred Q,” Coffee Pete said, putting down his empty beer glass. “If you don’t mind. If I had time, I’d take that girl over there and go have a relax out back.” He smiled, and Russell saw a great animal cunning in the old man’s face.
Russell counted out the money and added fifty quetzales, just because the old man seemed down and out and he felt sorry for him.
“I didn’t think there were people like you anymore,” the old man said, thanking him. “Generous people out here don’t last, as a rule. Only the mean last, kid. ’Cause the mean just don’t give a shit about heaven.” He slipped the money into his shirt pocket, behind taped-up reading glasses. Russell paid the bill and they left. The old man went to the bathroom, telling him to follow him once he got his VW turned around and pointed south.
Russell went out to the parking lot and loaded his combat shotgun with six rounds of double-0 buck shot. He loaded the little Velcro belt built right into the stock of the shotgun, then put more loose rounds on the seat, where he could get to them quickly. When he was finished, he laid his weapon on the seat next to him and looked out at the road. He’d tried unsuccessfully to buy a hand grenade on the black market. In a firefight they made all the difference. He would try again, he thought, waiting. He didn’t want to die defenseless, as his mother had. The war had ended, but not the violence.
Russell watched the old American come out of La Ultima, run to his VW bus, and start it up. It belched smoke. The old man flashed him a smile, then pulled carefully out into traffic and took off. Russell kept expecting, as he watched from the parking lot, for the VW to turn around and come back south. The old man drove off, gaining speed, heading north toward Mexico.
Russell watched him pass a truck and disappear. He thought about chasing him, but decided against it. It would be a race into the town, there were a thousand side roads to turn into and hide, and undoubtedly the old man, like any good rat, knew all the good holes. He took off with only the name of the plantation and a curt description of how to find it. He got that lost feeling again as he drove south, but it passed.
He’d written his mother a last letter soon after her death. He wrote it on her birthday and mailed it. In that letter, he told his mother everything he’d never gotten a chance to tell her. He laid out his plans for the future, telling her that he thought that his years of military school had been good for him, and that he hoped to be a doctor or soldier; something “worthwhile.” There had been a moment after he’d read his uncle’s letter when he’d been gripped with a horrible panic. He thought he might have no future at all.
He’d walked to the duty officer’s room and handed him the letter, which was a “dead letter” even before it was mailed. The older boy—a captain—in mufti, because it was the weekend, was on the phone with his girlfriend. The captain nodded to him, took his letter and threw it on a pile with many others; and that was it. He’d gotten on with his life. He’d gone on. Now he’d ended up back here in his mother’s country, half crazy and not even aware of it.
ONE
October 1, 1972
Guatemala, Plantation “Las Flores”
Isabella Cruz Price, despite all the people around her, felt very alone. She turned the crank of the old-fashioned black telephone in the morning room, trying to get a line.
The Cruz family plantation, Las Flores, was enormous—ten thousand acres. Even now, parts of it had never been planted or exploited in any way; whole tracts lay virginal and untouched. It was a verdant, tree-filled womb, creating oxygen that would fill the lungs of Californians, New Yorkers, and Englishmen without them ever knowing where it came from. The plantation had been bought by her great-grandfather for—it was said—one thousand dollars, long before Isabella was born and sent to the United States to study at a convent school near San Francisco. A nun at that school fell in love with her, because even as a young girl, she was very beautiful. Isabella had thick chestnut hair, very white skin, and exciting blue eyes that pulled you in. The nun—who lost her faith— would die years later still thinking about Isabella, still completely in love with her.
She got a line. The telephone operator put her through to her brother’s apartment in Guatemala City. Isabella heard the phone ring. She pictured the living room of the apartment with its view of Avenida La Reforma, the grandness of that view. The street, a Third World version of the Champs Élysées, had been designed by an architect who hoped Guatemala City might, someday, be the Paris of Central America. He was an intelligent fool, or an extreme optimist; the city would never be anything like Paris.
When they were children, Isabella and her brother would drink lemonade on Sunday, before lunch with the family, watching out for their father’s car—a big black chauffeur driven Buick—as it came down the widest avenue in Central America. They would rollerskate through the halls of the apartment, frantic to greet him. They had been very happy as children, surrounded by three generations of the family and the knowledge that somehow they were important and powerful.