“I had to take an enormous amount of decongestants. I had a cold, Carlos thought it was so funny,” she said. She lifted her glass and took a drink, her eyes watching him. “Do you skin dive, Mr. Price?” Her eyes held him for a moment; then she looked away, to where Katherine was standing holding her phone.

“No,” he said. “I don’t.” He couldn’t feel natural with her at first. Later he spoke to other men who said they felt the same way, men who were normally inured to beautiful women, either because they were playboys or because they were happily married. In either case they couldn’t get over the impression she made, it was something profoundly sexual. Until you saw it, you couldn’t describe it. If you were a man, you wanted her. It was very simple.

“You really must. It’s an entirely different world down there,” Beatrice said, looking at him. “It’s where life began. The ocean.” She moved her long blonde hair out of her eyes.

“Well, I’ll keep that in mind,” he said.

“What do you do, Mr. Price? When you aren’t building houses.”

“I’m a journalist,” he said.

“Oh, then you’ll have to meet my husband. He collects journalists. He gets them to write only nice things about him. He’s very, very good at that.”

He heard Katherine’s phone slap shut. Both Beatrice and Russell turned to look at her. It was their first conspiracy.

Later, when he was leaving, Beatrice appeared again.

“You’ve lost your book, the Delacroix,” she said. Completely nonplussed, he looked at her. He was leaving with the others, going down the front stairs of the house. Beatrice was holding her husband’s hand. They were both framed by the enormous doorway. It was very, very hot and almost completely dark out now. The maids had been ordered to bring them flashlights. He was trying to get one, and didn’t even realize Beatrice was speaking to him.

“Your back pocket,” Beatrice said, as if she was reading his mind. He’d forgotten that he’d taken the book with him. It had slipped out of his pocket somehow in the house. The maid handed him the book and a flashlight. Somehow it must have fallen out. He took the paperback book from the maid and looked up at Beatrice.

“I’ve read it. I had to at school. Oxford,” she said. He nodded a thank you. He had no idea how she knew it was his.

He spent that evening reading the Delacroix by the air conditioner, sometimes walking to the window of the little bungalow where he’d been put up and thinking about Beatrice. Katherine came to the door about nine; she’d been having a meeting with the general. She said she wanted to use the shower, as hers wasn’t working. They made love afterwards. She was very amorous. She was much more passionate than she appeared holding onto her telephone, or driving her jeep.

Afterwards he continued to think about Beatrice, what she was doing, even while he was lying naked on the small bed and Katherine was telling him all about the general and what he’d said about the upcoming elections. He was going to run for president. He’d told her that he was sure he was going to win.

After Katherine had left—when it was very late—Russell continued to think about the general’s wife, what she was doing. What, if anything, she might be saying to her husband about him. He wondered what kind of conversations that kind of man and a woman who’d been to Oxford could possibly have.

When he got back that Sunday night to his apartment in the capital, he emailed his senior editors in London and pitched the idea of a series of articles on the upcoming presidential election. He knew from speaking to his bosses in the past that they didn’t like General Selva on principle, and considered him an arch-example of the anti-democratic forces in the country that were bad for business. His editors, he’d guessed, would jump at the opportunity to push Antonio De La Madrid, the pro-business, neo-liberal candidate who was opposing Selva for president. He wasn’t surprised when he got the green light for the series. He wanted to see Beatrice Selva again.

EIGHT

He’d come back to Tres Rios to start searching for the Red Jaguar. The morning was viciously hot and clear, as if it hadn’t rained all night. When Russell walked outside with his cup of coffee, he could see the Volcan de Agua in the distance, part of a cruel-looking set of green mountains to the north. By four in the afternoon it would rain again, but the mornings were hot and humid and perfectly clear. The plantation’s rear garden was flat and had a fountain the French family had built, and a huge pond with fish. There was a swimming pool too, but it was empty, its white-painted bottom glistening now in the morning sun.

Russell walked to the edge of the pool. Sitting down, he let his legs dangle over its edge. He’d have it filled, he thought. He drank his coffee in silence and listened to the early morning sounds of the plantation: birds, horses being taken from their stalls, sounds of domesticity from the workers’ housing. There was a mixture of children’s voices and ranchera music, too.

He looked into the empty blue sky, cleaned of everything, for signs of rain. Why shouldn’t I feel optimistic? he thought. It was true he owed a great deal of money now, but he owned all this, and somewhere out there might be a great treasure. Maybe he would stay here after he found the Red Jaguar. He could be a man of leisure. Carl had assured him the Jaguar would fetch millions of dollars. His share would be enough to live on the rest of his life wherever he chose. Could he really be happy back in San Francisco? Or had this country gotten under his skin in some way, its Wild West quality perversely satisfying something in him?

“Don Russell?” He turned around. The girl who had opened the gate for him that first day was standing in front of him, barefoot like a goddess—a brown-skinned Diana.

“Yes,” he said. He had to shade his eyes to look at her. She was wearing the same yellow dress. Behind her, the white volcanic sand used to pave the garden was catching the sunlight. It made the sand sparkle under her feet like crushed diamonds.

“May I work in the kitchen? You will need a cook, Patron?” she asked in Spanish. “I worked sometimes in the kitchen— for Don Pinkie.” The girl was looking down at her bare feet. “I can clean, too . . . if you like?” The French family was going to take their own maid and cook with them to the capital. They’d been staying here, but were finally leaving that morning.

Russell suspected that Don Pinkie, who owned several other plantations, was going broke slowly and would finally be ruined. That morning at breakfast, he’d kept checking his pager, which gave him the current price of coffee at the Chicago Board of Trade. He’d come to have breakfast and to say goodbye to Russell and Mahler.

“Seventy dollars, that’s all we need, right!” Don Pinkie had said to him at breakfast, as if Russell were an experienced coffee plantation owner. The fact was he’d never grown a house plant, much less run a coffee plantation. He knew nothing about the practicalities of coffee production. What he did know about the business he’d learnt over three years of covering the commodity as a financial journalist. From what he could tell, the over production in the world’s coffee market was going to kill off most growers in Central America. They just didn’t stand a chance against the Vietnamese and the Brazilians, who paid their workers even less.

The Frenchman reminded him of himself when he’d been holding a losing position while trading stocks. Why is it we always believe things will get better, he wondered, looking at the Frenchman. Why do we believe that the stock will go up in an hour or tomorrow? That prices will turn around? That she will love me better tomorrow?