He looked Carl in the eyes. The thought of the kid holding him at gunpoint was making his heart race.

The anger he’d been keeping at bay since he heard Blanco had appointed Selva president started to spill out. Beatrice had called him, to tell him again that she couldn’t possibly leave the country. She was afraid of Carlos in a way she’d never been before. He would be president of the country by tomorrow, and more powerful than ever.

“No. You drop yours. It’s your fault Carl looks like that,” the kid said.

“You motherfucking punk. What did you say to me?”

“It’s your fault the jaguar did that to him. To my Carl.”

Russell knew then that the kid was going to kill him. He just understood it. He was still looking at Carl, at his face. He could see the scars on Van Diemen’s face and the look in Carl’s eyes. Carl wanted the kid to shoot him; it was in his eyes. Carl wouldn’t stop him.

“Tell this punk of yours to put his fucking gun down, or I’m going to kill him,” Russell said. He could barely speak. The rage was choking him. “Do you hear me, kid? I’m going to kill you.”

As soon as he said it, Russell turned around, snapped his elbow up, and hit the kid’s gun. It went off. The blast in the bathroom was loud. Russell grabbed the kid’s arm and managed to slap his hand towards Carl. The gun went off again. By now Russell had his hand on the kid’s wrist; he brought his knee up hard and snapped the kid’s arm at the elbow. He felt the arm break, and heard the boy scream. The gun fell to the floor.

Russell looked up. Van Diemen had a bullet in his face and was jerking on the toilet, already dead. Russell’s ears were ringing from the gunshots.

“Ah, mi brazo! Ay… Ay mi brazo! Ahi, Poppi, mire que me ha hecho a mí brazo.” The kid, screaming, hadn’t yet seen what he’d done. He was in agony looking at his broken arm, the bones sticking out of the elbow. The arm pointed back in an ugly way.

“You killed him,” was all Russell could say. “You dumb motherfucker!”

The kid picked his head up and looked at Carl’s body on the toilet.

“You happy now, asshole?” Russell picked the kid up, carried him into the bedroom, and sat him on the bed. The kid’s face was blank, as if he couldn’t believe it.

“You’re going to tell me where he sells his stuff. There must be a person in Europe—someone. A phone number. Something!” Russell said. The kid kept looking toward the bathroom. He hadn’t said a word. He had to be in a lot of pain, but suddenly he wasn’t saying a word; he wasn’t even holding his mangled arm. He was just staring into the bathroom, at the body on the toilet.

“Listen to me, asshole. I want a name. I need to have that name or I’m going to break your other arm. Are you listening to me? I don’t care, you understand? I don’t care about your dead boyfriend, and I don’t care about you. You understand that? I need a name.”

The kid wasn’t listening to him.

Russell reared back and slapped the kid in the face, knocking him back onto the bed. “Can you hear me now? You’re going to give it to me. I’ve come too far to let a punk like you stop me. Do you understand me, kid?”

“His brother . . . Poppi’s brother. He’s the one. He buys everything from Carl,” the kid said, looking up at him. “He’s in Paris. He has a gallery in Paris.”

“Get up and get me the fucking number,” Russell said. “Go on. . . . Get the fuck up and get me that number.”

“I can’t,” the kid said. “I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. Where is it? So help me, God, I’ll break the other one.”

“On the computer. He has it there,” the kid said. He was going into shock. He was starting to shake, and he’d turned deathly white. Because of his arm, he couldn’t push himself up off the bed.

“Where is it? His computer?”

“In the office,” the kid said.

“It’s your fault he’s dead,” Russell said. “We were just talking. Everything would have been fine. It’s your fault.”

He went outside to the courtyard and saw the fountain was on. The gardener and maid had run away. He went to Carl’s study and found a laptop. Russell picked it up and took it with him. As he left, he could hear the kid sobbing.

TWENTY-NINE

Spring 1988

Love is a strange thing. It acts independently of reason, because all great and true love creates great and true pain— pain, because all love must end in death, disappointment, or both. The stronger the love, the less reason to it. Most people don’t suffer from it, fortunately; most are indifferent types who see real love as a nuisance. It is a special kind of madness.

Olga had the madness and didn’t know it. She loved Isabella, but never thought of it as love. To her, Isabella was simply part of her life, perhaps even more than a sister. They had, after all, shared a wondrous childhood, the kind that would never be seen again, in this country or anywhere else. Their childhood had been filled with nature and walks and running, the sky and the rain and the sound of people’s voices working nearby. They had belonged to a place, and the place belonged to them. It had embraced them completely. They had been happy together as only children can be happy.

She went back to the central police station the next morning to ask for help because her mistress had not come home for the second night, nor had she sent a message. This had never happened before.

The new administrator had called from the plantation and asked for Isabella. Olga had said simply that her mistress hadn’t come home. Stunned, the administrator said he would call Isabella’s brother immediately in Paris. The administrator called back in an hour and told Olga to go back to the police station and make inquires.

The sergeant she’d spoken to barely remembered her. Because she didn’t have any more money, he didn’t even bother looking up the missing person’s form he’d filled out the day before. He told her, in a very curt way, that no white woman’s body had been reported found. Then he continued his conversation with one of the other policemen at the counter.

This was a shock. Olga had not, until that moment, thought that Isabella could be dead. The idea of her mistress being dead was impossible to fathom.

She went back to the apartment, hoping against hope that when she entered Isabella would be there talking on the phone, or sitting at her desk working, and they would not have to speak about the last few days, as they had never spoken about the men who occasionally spent the night and left early —including, once, the President of the republic. But it wasn’t to be. When she unlocked the door, the apartment was cold and the lights were still off.

She went to her mistress’s office and sat on the edge of a club sofa that had been bought in San Francisco. She stared at the phone until it rang, hours later.

“Sí, Don Roberto. Sí, entiendo, muy bien. Inmediatemente,” Olga said.

Isabella’s brother’s voice was frightened, and he spoke loudly. He was conscious of being a disappointment to everyone who had ever known him. But he was successful in the movie business, finally producing two comedies that garnered some attention. An Italian movie star—a very young girl who would later become famous in the United States— was in the room with him, and he told her to get out while he spoke to Olga. He wanted to be alone while he spoke on the phone.

“I’ll come home as soon as I can,” he told Olga. “Everything will be fine. I’m sure my sister has just done something impulsive.” Olga didn’t understand the word “impulsive”; she thought it meant sick.

“She was fine when she left,” Olga said, thinking that would help. “Not sick at all.”

“Yes. Well, I’m sure she’ll turn up. Where did she go?”

“I don’t know,” Olga said, and she was so sorry that was true. She didn’t have any idea. “But she left with Don Antonio.”