The Devil to Pay Read online

Thinking about Josh’s remark that I was attracted to him gave me tight jaws. What really antagonized me about the man was that I did have an immediate sexual attraction to him. And not because he ran me off the road. There was a certain wildness and magnetism about him that attracted me.

  Why is it that so many of us good women make bad decisions about men? This jerk literally ran me off the road, used foul language on me, robbed the cradle, and here I was, an intelligent, successful businesswoman instantly attracted to him.

  21

  I was having coffee and toast with Juana in the kitchen the following morning when Cesar came in and asked if I was ready to see the plantation. He seemed to be in a better mood than last night, at least to the extent that he didn’t come across as a smoldering volcano.

  Petty on my part, but I had to wonder whether he had simply resolved to deal with me … or his anger level had been lowered by last night’s passions with the China Doll.

  Before we left the kitchen, Cesar gave Juana a breakfast-in-bed order for Lily. Juana raised her eyebrows and muttered something I didn’t make out, but I’m sure it wasn’t complimentary toward the guest upstairs.

  “We’ll start with the nursery,” Cesar said. “It’s Sunday, but there’ll be a few workers around.”

  The nursery was a garden area where coffee trees were started from seeds. He said it took about eight weeks for the seeds to germinate.

  “Not just any seeds are planted; we choose the best. And we keep weeding out poorer plants. Our beans are very large; I know of no plantation growing bigger or better beans in all of Colombia.”

  “Larger beans from Central America are called elephant beans.” I knew the name from buying beans to roast and grind in my store. The theory was that the larger the bean, the better the coffee.

  “The secret of why Café de Oro grows the finest coffee beans is the care that is taken every step of the way. Carlos was a genius at selecting the best plants. For decades, he personally chose every bean that went into the nursery from trees he believed would produce the best coffee. Many people can tell you how beans are to be selected, but few have the talent to be able to actually pick the best.”

  “What was he like, personally?”

  “A fool,” Cesar snapped.

  Despite the harsh characterization, there was no question that he had spoken with pride about Carlos. I didn’t ask why Carlos was a fool—I thought it best to get a tour of the plantation before starting any conversations that could go to hell.

  I followed Cesar to the area where the plants were growing over knee-high.

  “When the plants are about two feet tall, we use them to replace trees that are no longer good producers.”

  “How long before plants produce usable coffee?”

  “It takes several years before we get blooms and cherries, but we are working them long before they bloom and continuously afterwards. If left unattended, the trees can grow over thirty feet high. We keep them trimmed down so the cherries can be handpicked. Picking is another labor-intensive process. We pick the cherries only when they’re a deep red, but they don’t ripen all at the same time. That means workers have to return to a tree seven or eight times during the harvesting season.”

  “How much coffee does each tree produce?”

  “On the average, you can think of it as about a pound per tree. We have about two hundred and fifty thousand trees spread over the five hundred acres of the plantation.”

  I quickly figured the plantation produced about a quarter of a million pounds of coffee each year. I didn’t know how much plantation coffee sold for or what the profit margin was, but I knew enough to realize that that much coffee did not put me into the class of a superrich heir.

  “You understand, of course, we grow only Arabica coffee.”

  “Yes, I sold only Arabica in my store. I’ve been told that you don’t grow Robusta in Colombia.”

  “We grow many things in our country, some of which gets sold on the streets of your country in white powder form. So it wouldn’t surprise me if there are plantations in the lowlands growing Robusta and selling it as Arabica. Do you know the difference between the two strains?”

  “A little. Robustas are grown mostly in Africa and Asia, Arabicas in the Western Hemisphere, mostly Colombia, Central America, Brazil, and southern Mexico, some in Africa. Robusta has a heavier and harsher taste and twice the caffeine.”

  “Robusta is junk coffee. The reason French and Italian roasts are so dark is because they originally got their coffee from Turkey and it was Robusta. They have to burn in the roasting process to make it palatable. But it can be grown cheaper than Arabica and in enormous quantities. It’s easier to grow and harvest. Even the Vietnamese have entered the coffee market, mostly with Robusta, but they are also producing Arabica. The last few years they’ve flooded the world market with Robusta.”

  I knew that Arabica was sold through a New York commodities market and Robusta was sold through London. Coffee was the second most traded commodity in the world, outranked only by petroleum. Regardless of where the central commodities market was, both Robusta and Arabica make it into the can in Britain and the States.

  He said, “With Robusta selling for half the price of Arabica, most of your supermarket brands mix it with Arabica. People in America and Europe don’t realize that unless the label says it’s pure Arabica, they are getting inferior coffee mixed in.”

  He pulled a cherry off a tree and broke it open. “Each coffee cherry contains two beans in it. The beans are covered with layers of outer material that have to be removed before they’re shipped to roasters in the United States and Europe. The outer skin of the cherry and the wet pulp surrounding the beans is removed in our de-pulping machine. We de-pulp quickly after picking, usually within twenty-four hours.”

  The de-pulping machine looked like a big, iron meat grinder. Cherries were poured into a vat on top. Beans and the mucilaginous pulp poured out the bottom.

  “The pulp is a sticky, gelatinous substance. You can see some of it still clings to the beans after the de-pulping. To remove it, we wash the beans. But washing is also an important step in creating aromatic coffee. We put the beans into tanks for several days where the rest of the pulp is naturally removed by fermentation.”

  He took me to where beans were being dried on concrete terraces. Barefoot workers walked on the beans while raking. “The beans are raked and turned over several times a day to aid in the drying. Depending on the weather, it can take up to a couple weeks for them to dry. We don’t have hot-air dryers; we rely on sunshine. We cover the beans at night and when it rains. We lose part of the crop to moisture. If we had dryers, we wouldn’t lose so much.”

  “Why no dryers?”

  “Too much money to buy and to run.” He picked up dried beans. “At this point we call this parchment coffee because it still has skin on it. After the beans are dried, we do our own milling to remove the parchment with a polishing process.”

  After milling, the beans were packed in burlap bags. Each bag weighed 132 pounds.

  “Most growers simply truck the bags of green coffee to the port as soon as the sacks are full. Carlos always insisted on leaving the beans on the plantation for two more months after they were processed. He said it permitted the beans to get conditioned to their nakedness while still breathing the plantation air that they were grown in.”

  “Like aging a fine wine.”

  “Exactly. He believed that the composition of the soil even affected the taste. He refused to use commercial fertilizers.”

  “That’s good, isn’t it? Organic is healthier.”

  “It costs less to use commercial fertilizers than natural ones. And we’ve had a war with la broca, a coffee worm, bastardos that bore into the cherry. You can’t get rid of them with cow manure and the pulp from the de-pulping machine we use for fertilizer. It takes chemicals.”

  “How many workers does the plantation employ?”

  “During harvesting we have over a hun
dred, but most of those are colonos working off their rent.”

  Colonos. The word meant something like “farmers.”

  “What do you mean, working off their rent?”

  “We have three hundred colonos paying rent, some of them pay in labor.”

  “Are they paying rent for houses?”

  He gave me an odd look. “You don’t understand the system, do you?”

  I shrugged. “I’m learning it now.”

  “The colonos are tenant farmers. They work their farms for a share of the profits.”

  “They work the plantation—”

  “Not the plantation. The other fifteen hundred acres Carlos owned.”

  “There’s fifteen hundred more acres?”

  “You inherited two thousand acres. Five hundred in the main part of the plantation we run directly; the rest is rented to three hundred tenant farmers, averaging about five acres each. The farmers work the land allotted to them and get part of the crop in payment. And some help with the harvest on the plantation.”

  Sharecroppers, immediately came to my mind.

  I had inherited two thousand acres. At five hundred trees per acre, that was a million trees. A million pounds of coffee each year.

  I was rich!

  Cesar caught my thoughts and laughed without humor. “Don’t start spending it yet. Carlos was broke.”

  “Broke? But you said—”

  “A million pounds of green coffee can be produced each year, but coffee is selling for ninety cents a pound and it costs us nearly a dollar to produce it, so we lose a little on each pound. And it’s been down to seventy cents a pound. That’s for coffee you sold for six or eight dollars a pound in your Seattle store.”

  “The plantation, with its tenant farmers, is losing money?”

  “It’s a hole in the ground that Carlos threw money into. The debacle started about five years ago. Up to then, an international agreement set the price paid to coffee bean growers. The restrictions were dropped so the marketplace could set its own price. Everyone was already overproducing and on top of that, cheap Robusta and sun-grown Arabica flooded the market. The price of coffee dropped more than in half, and the small farmer’s cash crop became a starvation crop. The only people making money are the big, mechanized corporate farms growing sun coffee.”

  “Why is there such a big difference between the price of coffee grown in the sun and shade-grown?”

  “Shade coffee is labor-intensive and has fewer trees per acre because it requires a canopy of trees that takes up space. You can get two or three times as many trees per acre if you clear the land of the canopy. And the canopy keeps us from using mechanical equipment for harvesting. Most coffee in this country is now being sun grown, the same way Brazil does their coffee. Shade-grown is the past, one we can’t afford.”

  “But aren’t shade-grown plants less damaging to the environment, what they call bird friendly, and healthier for us because they don’t require as much agrochemicals, the pesticides, fertilizers—”

  “Shade coffee is good for feeding birds—if you can afford it. If you want to make money, you knock down the forests, plant more trees, and bring in a few pieces of equipment that do the work of a hundred laborers. This plantation would be worth millions if the canopy was cleared, the tenant farmers evicted, and trees planted densely.”

  “But that would change the entire environment. Don’t they call sun coffee an environmental desert? And the coffee would not be the high quality that Café de Oro produces—”

  His features darkened with annoyance. “You sound like Carlos. I told you he was a fool; he could have been rich, but he was too soft to evict the tenant farmers and too full of pride at growing fine coffee. What good is it to grow the best coffee if someone in Africa or Asia or even your next-door neighbor is producing inferior beans and doing it cheaper?

  “You think the restaurant and fast-food chains, the supermarkets and discount stores, care about what’s in the can? All they care about is making a blend that disguises the chemicals used to grow and process it and the fact it’s loaded with cheap Robusta.”

  “There has to be some pride in what we do. Just because other growers have a mentality—”

  “You don’t understand, it’s hard work, backbreaking, day and night, year after year, for what? To have our fine coffee dumped into cans and mixed with sun-grown or Robustas? The big wholesale coffee buyers only want to talk about price, not the environment. When a commodity trader in New York is setting the price for coffee, he doesn’t give a damn where or how it was grown; it’s just so many pounds, figures on a piece of paper, to him.”

  “But what about the little farmers, the colonos, what would they do? They have families—”

  “These people have been poor their entire lives; it would be an act of mercy to turn them out. They can go to work for the cartels producing the most profitable cash crop in the country.”

  “That’s cruel.”

  “That’s life.” He stalked away, only to suddenly turn back to face me. “Your inheritance is owned by the bank and the note is due in a few months. When they take over the plantation, they’ll do exactly what I tried to get Carlos to do—turn the operation into a sun farm. He was too proud and inflexible; he died broke. You should have taken the offer to sell—stick around and you’ll just get evicted by the bank along with the colonos.”

  22

  Like I’ve always said, there’s a snake in every paradise. I was rich—for about two seconds. Now it looked like all I’d inherited was trouble.

  I walked through the shade canopy, listening to the chatter of birds, soaking in the wonder of it all while my mind buzzed with questions.

  Cesar knew an awful lot about my affairs. Last night he mentioned my Seattle problems. Today he revealed he knew about the attempt to buy the plantation. What else did he know? Was the plan to get the plantation for peanuts and turn it into a profitable sun farm—or did Cesar, Scar, and whoever else was involved plan to use it to grow that most profitable of all Colombian crops: cocaine?

  I didn’t know anything about cocaine except that I had read in the South American travel book that the stuff was processed from the coca plant. I had no idea what the plant looked like except that I assumed it was green and leafy. The stuff could be growing all around me and I wouldn’t know it. Someone told me it used to be an ingredient in Coca-Cola, but they took it out eons ago.

  I hummed “I get no kick from cocaine” as I walked alone, trying to remember what song the words came from.

  The weird twists my life was taking were mind-boggling. I seemed to race from one puddle of trouble to another. Puddle? Troubles were coming at me like tsunamis.

  The source of my Seattle problems was here on the plantation; that was a no-brainer. My landlord was innocent—at least of blowing up my business. An attempt was made to create financial havoc for me in Seattle, so I’d jump when a lowball offer to buy the plantation was made. That was it in a nutshell. It was Cesar, Ramon, Scar, and probably wild man Josh, all in it together.

  The attempt nearly got me killed, but I hoped that wasn’t part of the plan.

  Pieces falling together into a nice pattern, at least in my mind, was a relief. I also knew the solution—cut and run. But I was fresh out of places to run. I’d be out of here in a New York minute if I had anywhere to go. I was stuck here. But I was getting tired of being used as a punching bag. My ire was up. The bastards had ruined my life.

  The only way I was going to be able to recover what I had had, clear my name, and get what I had coming out of the plantation was to be smarter than them. And stay alive along the way.

  I couldn’t confront Cesar and Company because I couldn’t call the cops. I somehow doubted he could kill me deliberately—I mean, blow up my business, yes, but I couldn’t believe that Cesar and the rest of them would deliberately try to kill me, except maybe Scar. And even that was only a possibility, because they wanted to buy the plantation, not complicate things.

&n
bsp; Something else had also gotten under my craw. The colonos. Three hundred tenant farmers and their families. I met some of them today and saw the hard work they performed and the honor in their eyes and on their faces.

  I’m not a world saver, not like my mother, who was ready to put up her dukes and fight for any good cause that came along. But I wasn’t Simon Legree, either. I couldn’t stomach the idea of ripping out all the lush vegetation any more than I could of evicting hundreds of families.

  Cesar was wrong when he said it would do them a favor to cut their ties with the plantation. I knew enough about the economy of a country like Colombia to know there’s a small cadre of elite rich at the top and an enormous mass of poor at their feet—with almost no opportunity for the poor to improve their lot. There was no place for them to go. That’s why there were so many guerrilla movements in the country—millions of Colombians were at the bottom and had no hope or future.

  Selling the tenant farms out from under the colonos would be cruel. It wasn’t something I could do, no matter how desperate I was.

  The notion of losing the plantation to a bank—a bloodless, heartless stone entity—was just as repulsive. The bank would send a liquidator to the plantation to rip out the families and the canopy of trees and sell the place to a big sun farm concern.

  Jesus, what a load of problems I’d inherited. It sounded like a miracle was needed to keep the place in business. And to clear my name in Seattle.

  So far there had been little heavenly intervention in my affairs. Mostly it had been the work of the devil.

  Deep in thought, I walked along until I came across a hut with only three walls. Seeing it was furnished with a small roaster, a coffee grinder, bottled water, cups, a coffeemaker, and filters, it didn’t take me long to figure out what it was—a cupping station.

  Cupping was the process by which experts and connoisseurs tasted coffees and appraised their qualities. It was also used to find defects or to perfect blends of coffee.

  A worker in a straw hat came along, a man who looked to be in his forties. “Buenos días,” he said.