“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.