The Devil to Pay Read online

  We went into the tall living room and paused at the foot of the stairway that led up to the second floor. A series of paintings were on the wall.

  “Carlos, his father, and his grandfather,” she said.

  Was this my father and his family? Carlos had strong features, masculine, even patrician. His hair was long, falling over his ears; his eyes were large and full of expression. He reminded me of pictures I’d seen of caballeros of the era when most Latin America countries were Spanish colonies. Caballeros, wealthy horsemen and hacienda owners, were the “knights” of the age. Carlos had that proud look of a Spanish aristocrat, not arrogant but intelligent, confident, and courageous.

  Ramon, my bastard plane companion, also had those handsome Latin looks, but he was just sexy. Carlos looked distinguished and had a commanding presence.

  I saw something else, too.

  “A poet,” I said.

  “A poet?”

  “That’s what he reminds me of. I see an artistic side to him. Did he write or paint?”

  “His life was the coffee. He believed you had to live it, breathe it, even love it, to understand it. So yes, he was an artist—and his canvas was the plantation. He had a reputation for growing the finest coffee beans in the country. Of course, that means the finest in the world, because Colombia has the best coffee anywhere. The only recreation that he took was sometimes he would go into the mountains by himself.”

  “To hunt?”

  “No, he didn’t hunt. He loved finding exotic plants, ones he had never seen before. He would sometimes bring them back to the plantation and plant them or send them to a friend, a botany professor at a university in Bogotá. Several times the plants were types no one had brought forward before.”

  I stared at the portraits again, looking for myself in them. It was probably only my imagination, but I was certain that I saw my eyes and lips in Carlos’s face.

  Like the house, I felt an immediate connection with him. Maybe it was just my imagination again—my wish to have a father—but I felt like I knew him. No, not knew him, but understood him.

  Juana said, “I’ll show you the second level, but we need to be quiet because—”

  “No necessity to be quiet,” a voice from the top of the steps said. “I am awake.”

  The woman at the top of the stairs would not have been a surprise to me in Seattle, but it was a shock here in Colombia’s coffee plantation country.

  19

  The woman staring down at us from the top of the stairs was Chinese, but not just Chinese—she was a China Doll, one of those exotic and provocative women who infatuate Western men.

  She had spoken in Spanish, heavily accented with foreign intrigue.

  She had nothing on under her sheer silk nightgown, which was obvious even from the bottom of the steps. Her small breasts jutted up against the transparent silk in a way mine hadn’t done since I left young womanhood behind.

  I was petty enough to immediately wonder if her breasts had some artificial help in standing at attention but immediately realized that my thoughts were wishful thinking. Her breasts were too small and delicate to have been surgically enhanced. Anything beyond a mouthful for a man was a waste, a friend once told me.

  She looked as if she had stepped out of a James Bond movie—in which she played the role of the sexy villain.

  As a woman who has had her own moments of playing the slut, I recognized one when I saw one.

  She stared down at us, her face impassive. The only clue to her feelings was that they couldn’t be read.

  “Senoritas, Nash Novak, Lily Soong.”

  “How do you do?” I smiled up at her.

  She nodded down at me, a queen acknowledging the salutation of a subject. Then she turned and walked away.

  Seeing Juana’s embarrassment, I grabbed her arm. “We can see the upstairs later. Tell me about the marvelous plants that are shading the veranda. They’re gorgeous and I don’t recognize them.”

  When we were on the veranda, I asked, “Is she Cesar’s wife?”

  “His girlfriend, the daughter of a man who is doing coffee experiments.” Juana scowled. “When I was young, a woman would not have thought of ending an evening with her boyfriend by staying overnight.”

  I didn’t point out that that was before the Pill and the sexual revolution, and probably wasn’t completely true, anyway. To my generation, Juana’s attitude was typical of the sexual hypocrisy that had a different standard for female sexual behavior than male.

  “Senorita Soong’s father is a scientist visiting here from China, a chemist. He is working with a Colombian chemist to develop a coffee tree that will produce decaffeinated coffee beans.”

  “Decaffeinated coffee right off the tree? That’s a wonderful idea.”

  “An idea only. I don’t believe they have succeeded, nor will they during my lifetime. Carlos had worked with a chemist, too, for many years, trying to develop such a plant, but nothing came of it. Now Cesar has permitted these two men to set up shop in workers’ huts about a mile from here. You will meet them tonight. Now that Senorita Soong has seen you, it will only be polite to invite them to dinner tonight.” Juana took my arm. “I want to show you something.”

  She led me to the garage and lifted one of the doors. A green car faced me. It was old, 1950s, I thought, and rather elegant. The front grille was broad and its headlights double. A wide V with an 8 in the middle indicated the car was a V-8. Despite the fact the car was built before the space age, the futuristic hood ornament, two rockets looped together, could have been used for a spaceship in the Star Wars movie.

  “An old Rolls?” I asked.

  “A 1957 Nash Ambassador.”

  “Really? A Nash? You know, someone told me there was a car by that name, but I thought it was a small car, some sort of early compact. This car is elegant; it’s fabulous.”

  “Carlos told me that the Nash changed when it was merged with another type of car, but this was his favorite model. He would not have traded it for the Rolls you mentioned. It was his baby, as he called it; he kept it in perfect condition. As you can see, it looks new.”

  I realized that my name had come from this car.

  “Where’s he buried?” I asked.

  Juana nodded at the top of the hill where the falls began.

  “Up there, so he can look down at the plantation he loved.”

  I wanted to see it, but not now, maybe later when I could go up alone.

  “Did you know my mother?” I asked.

  She looked away from me. “No.”

  I sensed she wasn’t telling me the truth but was interrupted from asking her why she had lied by the sound of a car coming up the hill.

  “Cesar has returned,” she said.

  20

  He hated me on first sight. But that was probably an understatement—more likely, he hated the idea of my existence long before he saw me in the flesh.

  A couple of things were pretty obvious to me the moment I saw him step out of the SUV, slamming the door behind him.

  He was probably Carlos’s son—I noticed some similarities.

  And the person who had been disinherited.

  He had not bothered being polite but started in on me, demanding to know who the hell I was to drive to the plantation when he was told to pick me up at the train station.

  I locked eyes with him. “Last time I looked I’m an adult who isn’t answerable to you. And if you had some way for people to communicate with you, there wouldn’t be a problem.”

  “Please, Cesar, she just arrived.…”

  He walked past me and into the house. I soothed Juana’s distress and let her show me to my room. I lay on the bed for a while, trying to sleep, but gave it up. I was still upset by Cesar’s rude behavior toward me. I took a shower and got ready for dinner.

  Cesar was close to my age. I learned from Juana that he was twenty-nine, which made him two years younger than me, but he seemed older. He was average height, a couple inches over my five-s
even, and had dark hair with a little curl, and long, thick sideburns. Machismo sideburns was how I thought of them. He wore a Panama hat and open shirt with a heavy gold chain.

  I hate gold chains on men—why does it always seem to be the most masculine men who wear them, and men who leave the tops of their shirts unbuttoned so their chest hair puffs out?

  Cesar had something of the grandee aristocrat about him. Giving commands appeared to come naturally to him. Having supervised my own employees, with an iron fist when it was needed, I had no doubt Cesar let his underlings know who was in charge.

  Something else struck me about him almost immediately. The fact that he was Carlos’s son would make him my half brother. That Carlos was my father was no longer a question, at least to me.

  Why he had disinherited his son and left me a plantation in the most dangerous country in the world still puzzled me.

  Soon after Cesar arrived, preparations for dinner had started at the plantation. My plantation. But by dinnertime, I knew little about the plantation, except that the main casa was more stunning than I had imagined it would be.

  I sort of expected that someone—Cesar, the majordomo—would have shown me around a little before dinner, but I suppose I was lucky he didn’t throttle me.

  My first thought about my dinner companions was, Wow, what strange bedfellows. We had gathered for drinks in the living room before dinner. It was all very casual. The night air and the house had a tropical ambiance despite the fact we were too high in the Andes to be in the tropics.

  China Doll was there with her father. Dr. Soong, I was told, was a chemist from Hong Kong. They were an odd couple. The two had about as much family relationship as a Siamese cat and a mutt. Dr. Soong said almost nothing, and when he did, it was in barely recognizable shattered Spanish. His sole interest in social affairs was to loudly slurp his soup and chew his food with his mouth open. In other words, he had zero social decorum.

  His daughter, on the other hand, was ravishingly beautiful, sexy, and I hated the fact that every man in the room, including her father, stared at her with unrequited lust, which made me wonder about what kind of father–daughter relationship they had.

  Dr. Soong’s partner, Julio Sanchez, was a university professor from Medellín. Sanchez was top-heavy, rotund, with a short, fat Hitler mustache. He suffered from sinus problems of a type I’d seen with an employee who helped himself to money in my cash register to support his habit—an inflamed, dripping nose from a cocaine habit.

  The two chemists had taken over a group of huts for living and working quarters at the far end of the plantation. Juana told me the buildings were used by migrant workers during harvests and Cesar had loaned them to the scientists to pursue their idea of developing a coffee tree that grew decaffeinated beans. The terms were not explained to me, but I was left with the impression that the plantation would be rewarded with an interest in the process if it was successfully developed.

  Lily lived in a hut with her father. I was tempted to ask if that was when she wasn’t at the main house fucking Cesar.

  I admit I was probably jealous that she made me feel like an old padded bra in an age of surgically enhanced breasts, but there was a look in her eyes, an amusement almost, as if she knew something that I didn’t know—something about me.

  Which wasn’t hard, since I was operating almost completely in the dark about everything.

  Dr. Sanchez stared lasciviously at Lily. As he looked at her while he chewed on a piece of beef, I had this image of the plump scientist chewing on China Doll.

  Cesar had taken the commanding position at the head of the table, and Juana, being diplomatic, had steered me toward the other “head” of the table at the far end. It was a place of respect that I thought the older woman full of grace should take. I took a different seat and insisted she sit at the head of the table. Two women served us.

  We no sooner sat down when we had surprise visitors—a man and woman. My eyes widened and my temper rose the moment I saw the man. It was the bastard who had made me back up into a gully that left my rental car stuck.

  My blood boiled when he walked in.

  He grinned as he was introduced. “Nice to meet you.”

  “I wish I could say the same.”

  It took him a moment to realize who I was—maybe it was the fact that I glared at him the moment he walked in.

  Juana, a little surprised, asked, “You two have met?”

  “This is the person who ran me off the road.”

  “Sorry, I was putting out a fire; I needed to get down the road.”

  Cesar howled. “The fire was probably from the police. He was running from them; that’s why he had to run you off the road. That’s the life of a smuggler; one day you are buying champagne and the next you’re one step ahead of the police.”

  His name was Josh Morris. He had no class. His hair was too long; he didn’t shave often enough, and lacked the courtesy to sit down to dinner without removing a ragged Boston Red Sox baseball cap.

  I knew the type—losers who have dropped out of the mainstream to make a run at success, taking shortcuts and avoiding hard work. Not uncommonly getting involved in get-rich-quick schemes that included a dishonest buck.

  He hadn’t stopped for dinner but came to talk to Cesar. It didn’t surprise me that they would be friends. It appeared the only way either one of them knew how to talk was with a beer in hand.

  The worst thing about Josh that annoyed me was the woman who was with him. Fleshy, big-busted, she couldn’t have been a day older than a very mature, very well developed sixteen-year-old—and she was young enough to carry off being a saucy girl that aroused the prurient interests of the men in the room.

  Caught between the elegant butterfly from China and the Colombian Lolita, I felt uglier and dumpier than usual.

  What strange bedfellows, I thought again. While Cesar and Josh chatted about soccer and poker, and Juana went out of her way to make me comfortable, the rest of the group had absolutely nothing in common. The two chemists didn’t seem to relate to each other any better than they did with anyone else. China Doll and Lolita didn’t speak to each other or anyone else, but I’m sure neither of them could have carried any heavier subject matter than the colors of nail polish.

  When the chemists announced they were retiring, Juana signaled Cesar to offer a toast to me.

  He stood up, glass in hand, and the others stood up.

  “To our norteamericana visitor, may her days in our beautiful country be profitable and her problems at home disappear.”

  Juana gave him a look that said she wasn’t pleased with the toast. I smiled my thanks and, for Juana’s sake, smothered my annoyance. I would have rather told Cesar I wasn’t a “visitor” but the new owner and asked him how he knew about my “problems at home.”

  It did occur to me that the Seattle attorney told the Medellín attorney who told Cesar, but that was doubtful, since he couldn’t even phone him about the train. I was more inclined to see conspiracies than easy explanations. And an easy conspiracy theory connected Cesar with Scar and Ramon. The thought struck me that Cesar might be the one behind the offers, perhaps bringing in the other two for a piece of the action for helping him.

  Another thought also jumped out at me. A Chinese connection in Colombia … a Chinese gangster in Seattle blows up my business …

  I had so many conspiracy theories swirling in my head, I was sure the dark thoughts would be obvious to everyone around the table.

  I got up and excused myself to get some fresh air.

  A full moon and delightful scents greeted me. It was paradise. But every paradise has its proverbial snakes.

  I was leaning against a tree, staring up at the waterfall that glistened in the moonlight, when I realized I wasn’t alone.

  Josh was suddenly beside me.

  I grimaced and ignored him, folding my arms, looking back up at the falls.

  “Is there something you’d like to say to me?” he asked.

&
nbsp; “Good-bye? Good riddance?”

  “I know down deep that you really like me—”

  “You’re delusional.”

  “Why—”

  “I don’t like people who run me off the road because they are rude and stupid. How did you know I was an American? You cussed at me in English.”

  “Cesar told me you were coming. Is there anything else you’d like to get off your chest?”

  “I don’t like drug smugglers. You’re a slime, a sick criminal who spreads poison. I suppose you hang around school grounds to sell your stuff. Which is probably where you met your little friend. What are you paying her to be with you—cocaine in her baby bottle?”

  “You’re jealous; I saw it immediately. You fell for me the moment I ran you off the road. You’re the kind of woman who gets excited when a real man pushes her around.”

  I hated his cocky attitude. I wanted to punch him in the face.

  “Josh! Did you forget me?”

  Lolita had followed him out. Good thing, because he had left me completely speechless. I had absolutely no comeback for his ridiculous statement. I swept by Lolita and hurried back to the house.

  That night I lay awake in bed and listened to the passions of Cesar and Lily in the room above me until I couldn’t stand it anymore. I grabbed a blanket and went out to a swinging wicker couch on the veranda.

  I didn’t know what to make of the plantation and the people on it. I did know I was alone. And scared. My instincts told me I could trust Juana, there wasn’t any malice or deception in her … but the rest of them, what an ugly rogues’ gallery.

  I wondered what the relationship was between Josh and Cesar exactly. Were they just friends … or did Cesar grow cocaine somewhere on the plantation for Josh to smuggle?