“How much?”

“A thousand Q should do it,” Mahler said.

“Five hundred, partner. I’m not made of money.” The German looked at him and shrugged his shoulders. “Yeah, five-hundred. Das geht.”

“If we find this thing, we have to sell it. How do we do that? We can’t exactly take it to London on a plane,” Russell said.

“No, but it’s not illegal either. You own it if you find it on private property. I told you. It’s not like Mexico.”

“Yes, I know. I looked into it. But how do we sell it?”

“Carl. He said he’d buy anything we find. You can start with the stuff on the lawn if you want.”

“Carl?”

“Carl Van Diemen. The Dutchman who lives in Antigua,” Mahler said. “How do you think he paid for his big fancy house there?”

Russell had met Carl Van Diemen once. “I know him. I thought his daddy was rich or something,” Russell said.

“His daddy is rich, so … why you so pissing?”

“It’s, why are you so pissed,” Russell said.

“Okay, why?”

“I think I just did probably the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” he said. The German started to laugh at him.

A clap of thunder rolled over the house and shook them. Russell started to laugh too. It was crazy. He’d gone crazy. It had finally happened. Russell had heard countless stories about people like him, foreigners who went around the bend. Foreigners who had been here too long. He’d been here three fucking years. That was long enough to go crazy, he supposed. The rain hammered the roof.

“We’re both crazy,” the German said.

“Yeah, but you have a PhD from the University of Düsseldorf—almost,” Russell said, still smiling. The laughing had broken his dark mood. Okay, he was crazy. Okay, he’d just bought a coffee plantation in the middle of nowhere because some German hairball had convinced him that a giant red-jade jaguar worth a fortune was buried on it! He started to laugh again, the kind of laughter he couldn’t remember since he’d been a stock trader in New York, when he’d lost ten million dollars almost overnight. He looked up, holding his sides because they’d started to hurt. Mahler was looking at him very seriously.

“Fran…Fran…Frankfurt,” the German said, dead serious.

“What?” Russell said. He finally stopped laughing.

“Not Düsseldorf. Fran…Frankfurt,” Mahler said, very seriously.

“No shit! What the fuck difference does it make!” Russell said.

“It makes a difference.” Mahler smiled like he’d just found some money lying on the carpet.

“Yeah? Why?”

“Because everyone in Düss… Düsseldorf is a fucking idiot. They couldn’t find an elephant in a coal mine.” And he started to laugh again.

While they were laughing, the girl—the one who had opened the gate for Russell—crossed below in the garden. Mahler turned when he saw Russell looking. He said something in German. Russell didn’t have to speak German to understand what Mahler had said about the girl; it was universal. She was a goddess.

“Okay. Tomorrow we start,” Mahler said, turning back around.

THREE

September 1, 1973

San Francisco

They say you shot a man,” Montgomery Price said. Isabella’s ex-husband was a tall, blond Protestant from a good San Francisco family, with a fabulous career as an IBM executive in front of him.

He had won an award—in fact, it had been presented to him by J. P. Smith, the grandson of IBM’s founder. It had been the proudest moment of Montgomery’s life. He had sold more mainframe computers than any other salesman on the West Coast. Only the New York office had outsold him.

The award was an important milestone in his career. The day Montgomery won the award, he knew he would have to divorce Isabella. He was smart enough, at 31, to comprehend the extent of his mistake in marrying her. He was still young enough to fix the one thing wrong with his life. He’d simply married the wrong damn woman; it hit him as he went back to his seat, award in hand, and glanced at Isabella who, contrary to his wishes, had worn a mini skirt. (She had bought it in Paris, with her own money.)

Isabella had been a mistake. Some of his colleagues had stared at her. With the right woman by his side, he knew he could work his way into management. There would be no end to the possibilities, his boss had told him . . . but his boss had also suggested that Isabella was not an IBM wife. Not even close. She was simply too Latin, too flamboyantly feminine, and too young and sexy.

She made men uncomfortable. She was an embarrassment. She had parties where liquor was served in abundance, parties where she danced and got drunk in public. She had homosexual friends who called other men “honey.” There was a rumor that she used marijuana, which in fact was true.

“Is that true? Did you really shoot someone?” he asked Isabella.

He gave her a peck on the cheek. He thought she looked terrible, and was too thin. Since he’d never been to Guatemala, he had no idea what the place was like, other than the people he’d met—principally his wife’s family. They all seemed to be —over-everything, over-emotional, over-wealthy, over-fun loving, and lazy. He didn’t believe any of them ever really worked (Protestants of his ilk associated style with the devil and laziness). Isabella didn’t get up until ten in the morning. When she did get up, it was simply to give orders to the maid, Olga, who seemed strangely fond of her mistress, and vice versa. He thought their relationship “unhealthy,” and had told Isabella so.

“Yes,” Isabella said, and turned away. They were standing in a suite in San Francisco’s Clift Hotel, on Geary Street.

“Good God! And the baby was with you?”

Isabella turned for a moment to look at her husband. He was handsome in the way she expected of American men: healthy, tall and strapping. Many of them were a disappointment in bed. Montgomery had been the kind of man who clutched at her, and heaved. Heaving had been his idea of love making. After the disappointment, he would roll over and talk about his office. But it was the heaving that had left her feeling like an animal instead of a wife.

He wasn’t a bad man, and she’d been in love with him because he was what her long stay in the United States had taught her to want—a strapping, well-employed, blue-eyed man who looked like Troy Donahue.

She sat down by the window. Below, she could see Geary Street, and a theater marquee advertising “Man of La Mancha.” She had shot and killed a communist at the gate of her plantation, with her father’s pistol, while Olga, sitting next to her, clutched the baby and screamed. Afterwards she’d driven the three of them to the capital.

“Well, I always said that country was no good. Rotten, isn’t it. I’m certainly glad I never went. It’s in the papers all the time, the war news. Frightening. How can anyone do any business? I’m glad you’re leaving the boy with me. The right thing, of course. . .” Montgomery said. He finally saw the pain in her eyes and stopped talking for a moment, not knowing what to do. “. . . I mean, for everyone concerned.”

“It’s temporary,” Isabella said. “You understand that, Monty.”

“Of course. To be honest with you, I don’t know how Sally will do with Spanish. I think she studied it in high school—or was it French? Does the boy speak any English?”

“A little,” Isabella said. She was dying for a drink. Since she’d shot the man, she’d started to drink more.

“Well, we’ll change that,” Montgomery said. “Can’t live in today’s world and not speak English. Most of my clients from Mexico speak it better than I do!” Monty spoke to her as if she were one of the boys. “You know I’ve gotten a promotion.”