A King's ransom

PART THREE
38

It looked dead. Perfectly still, milky green, no sign of life, Lake Managua stretched for miles below me. As the commercial jet turned to make its final descent, I noticed a lone fishing boat below, no lines cast. I doubted that anything edible could be pulled from these waters.

I’d done a little homework for my trip, enough to know that Nicaragua was the largest country in Central America and one of the poorest. Tourism was virtually nonexistent, though extreme hikers liked to explore its extensive rain forests in the north-central mountains and along the eastern coast. Ninety percent of the population lived in the Pacific lowlands to the west, mainly in the capital city of Managua, tens of thousands surviving in open-air, tin-roofed shacks like the ones around Sandino International Airport. The lake was the repository of all things to be expected from a city with too many people and too little infrastructure.

My flight was an hour late. We taxied down the runway, past the old machine-gun stands that had defended the airport during the bloody Contra-Sandinista war of another decade. Nicaragua was at peace now, but with my father kidnapped by so-called revolutionaries in Colombia, I had to wonder what those former Contras were doing these days with all the leftover guns and ammunition that my own country had so freely provided.

“Bienvenido,” said the customs agent. “Welcome.” I passed without a search. No one seemed to care what I was bringing into the country. It was what people took out that raised eyebrows.

“Senor Rey?”

I turned to see a young man holding a cardboard sign with my name on it. “I’m your driver,” he said in English.

My first instinct was to thank him and hand him my bag, but I remembered Alex’s words of caution in Colombia. I couldn’t take anything for granted. “Who sent you?”

“Senor Guillermo Cruz.”

“What’s your name?”

“Ignacio.”

That was the name Guillermo had given to me in the previous night’s telephone conversation. Satisfied, I followed Ignacio outside and loaded my bags into the new Mitsubishi Montero waiting at the curb. Ignacio drove us to downtown Managua.

Last night I’d told Guillermo very little about the purpose of my visit. I’d simply said that some business and personal matters needed to be hashed out. He graciously invited me to stay as long as I wanted.

“Hold on!” said Ignacio as he slammed the brakes. A herd of goats crossed the busy street in front of us. A group of boys was playing baseball in the wide median, and the goats had been eating the grass in left field before being shooed away.

Ignacio put the SUV in gear, then stopped short again. This time it was an old guy riding some three-wheeled contraption. A huge basket in front held two squealing hogs-big ones, larger than my old golden retriever. They were throttling each other in a futile effort to break free, their twisted legs protruding through the basket’s wire mesh. One was upside down, on its head. The shrill screeches made me want to jump out and slap the owner. Animal cruelty was something that really bothered me, but this wasn’t Coral Gables.

“Dinner,” said Ignacio.

This was my introduction to the nation’s capital and its bustling city center, to the extent it had one. The real heart of Managua had been leveled by a 1972 earthquake that had left six thousand dead, and the temporary shelters that had sprung up were still here. Shacks along the road sold everything from used tires to mattresses. Newer stores abutted vacant lots, crumbling old buildings, and other signs of a thirty-year-old disaster that had yet to be cleaned up. Shoeless kids with dirty faces and tattered clothes were at every intersection, hawking radios, cashews, cigarettes, steering wheels, live parrots in homemade cages, and anything else they could get their hands on. Skinny horses pulled rickety wooden carts laden with vegetables. The taxis were mostly dilapidated old Russian cars, probably from Cuba. If Times Square had its neon signs, Managua had its floppy, hand-painted banners, one after another stretched across the busy streets advertising events and products. Up ahead was the Palace of Justice, its walls bearing the work of Nicaragua’s extremely busy graffiti artists. The most popular image was that of Augusto Sandino, the assassinated revolutionary hero who, from beneath his broad-brimmed sombrero, seemed to survey the country from every available wall and lamppost. A few blocks past the palace, overlooking an urban field of rocks, weeds, and cardboard homes, was the famous black, three-story statue of the campesino with a machine gun over his shoulder.

“Have you met Senor Cruz before?” asked Ignacio.

“Only on the telephone. I honestly don’t know much about him, other than that he’s my father’s partner.”

“I see.”

“Is he a good man?”

“You mean Senor Cruz?

“Yes.”

He steered through the intersection, smiling at my question. “He’s my boss,” he said simply. I waited for more, but he left it at that.

We reached headquarters around three o’clock.

Just the word “headquarters” had me thinking that I was headed for an office building. Rey’s Seafood Company, however, was based in an old ranch-style house that had been converted to commercial use. Security bars covered the windows. Big red flowers brightened the tiny front lawn. Inside, I was greeted by a team of extremely friendly people, none of whom seemed to have any qualms about working a full day on a Saturday as a matter of course.

“So you’re the son of Senor Rey,” I heard about a dozen times. Invariably some expression of concern for my father followed.

“We have been praying to the Blessed Virgin every day,” said the receptionist. She was young and quite pretty. All the women here were young and pretty. I wondered if my father was in charge of hiring. For Mom’s sake, I assumed it was Guillermo.

“Is Guillermo here?” I asked.

“In back,” said Ignacio. “I’ll take you.”

We walked through another part of the old house that appeared to have been a garage at one time. A stack of cans filled with marine paint lined the hallway. The branded hide of a brown-and-white cow was draped on the other. We continued through one added-on room after another, somewhere well beyond the footprint of the original house. These were purely administrative offices, not the processing plant. The lab was in one room, where they tested small samples of products that were ready for export. Freezers were in the next room, chain-locked, of course, to keep the frozen shrimp from walking out the door. In the back was the employee kitchen, which smelled of beans and seafood. Finally we reached the end of the hallway. A crucifix was on the door.

“Senor Cruz is in the chapel.”

“The chapel?”

“Of course,” Ignacio said, as if every office had one. “He prays every day. The last few days, twice a day.”

“For my dad?”

“He wants it to stop raining on our shrimp farms near Honduras.” He seemed to catch himself, then added, “I’m sure he prays for your father, too.”

We were talking loud enough to be heard in the next room, and sure enough the door opened. Out walked Guillermo.

“Nick, good to see you.”

He gave me a hug, which seemed a bit too affectionate coming from a man I’d never met in person. He must have sensed my stiffness.

“I feel like I know you, I’ve heard so much about you from your old man.”

“A few good things, I hope.”

“Only good things. He’s very proud of you.”

“That’s nice to hear.”

“Come back to my office, where we can talk.”

Ignacio left us, and I followed Guillermo down yet another hallway. He was making small talk about Nicaragua, all the things I needed to see while I was here. The volcanoes, the big cathedral in Granada.

Guillermo was younger than I’d expected, or at least younger-looking. He was almost as tall as I was, a good six feet, which definitely wasn’t the norm among Nicaraguan men. His smile was as smooth as his walk, and those big, dark eyes would have served him well if he were a Latin singer of love songs. Now that we’d met, I was certain that he, and not my father, had hired all the pretty young girls out front.

“Good flight over?” he said as we entered his office.

“Fine.” I took the chair facing his desk. He went around to the other side. I opened my carry-on bag and dumped the box of pastries on his desk. “Here’s the goodies you asked for.”

“Ah, thank you so much. You know, it’s not that you can’t find guava and cream cheese in Managua. But you just can’t beat the Cuban bakeries in Miami.” He unwrapped one and gulped it down. “So how can I help you?” he said with a mouthful of goo.

I paused, not sure where to begin. It didn’t seem wise to jump into the FBI allegations about my father’s business partner less than five minutes after meeting him. “My mother and I are getting concerned about Lindsey.”

“In what way?”

“Granted, it’s not unusual for us to hear nothing from her for weeks, sometimes months. That’s the way she’s decided to live her life. But with Dad kidnapped, we’re starting to worry.”

“When did you last hear from her?”

“About two weeks before the kidnapping.”

He nodded, then reached for another pastry. “Not sure I can help you there.”

For the first time since the introductory hug, he’d finally stopped smiling. I said, “Last time she called, she was somewhere in Nicaragua. So I was thinking maybe. .”

“That I was hiding something?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.”

He seemed too defensive. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not here to accuse anyone of anything, least of all you.”

“I’m glad you feel that way. But why don’t we just clear the air right away? It’s over between me and Lindsey.”

The words hit me like ice water. “What do you mean, ‘over’?”

“Done. Finished. I know your father didn’t approve. Your mother probably didn’t even know.”

“Are you saying that you and Lindsey. .”

He arched an eyebrow. “You mean you didn’t know either?”

“I didn’t know anything.”

“I thought you came here to talk about Lindsey.”

“I did, but- What were you doing going out with my sister?”

He leaned back in his chair, seeming to look past me as he spoke. “It started a few months ago, maybe longer. We saw each other once every couple of weeks, then once a week. Pretty soon she was dropping by here pretty regularly, and people started to talk.”

“What did my father say?”

“In a nutshell: Keep your hands off my daughter. He had a million reasons. I’m too old for her, it’s bad for the business, he doesn’t want his daughter hanging around the office. .”

“You’re married,” I said, using my Earth-to-Guillermo tone of voice.

“Well, that, too.”

“So you broke it off?”

“Not exactly. She did. She said your father wouldn’t allow it.”

“Not to deflate your ego, Romeo, but if my father wouldn’t allow it, that would be all the more reason for Lindsey to keep right on seeing you.”

His wounded expression slowly gave way to a wry smile. “I know that. Hey, maybe I was too old for her.”

“Or too married.”

“Jeez, you’re really fixated on that.”

“Must be a faulty synapse or something. Marriage. Fidelity. Not sure why those concepts are linked in my brain.”

“Okay, I get your point. You’re the big brother, and I understand how this is touchy for you. But the bottom line is, I haven’t seen your sister in at least a month.”

His phone rang. He excused himself, picked it up, and grunted a few clipped “Uh-huh”s to whoever was on the other end of the line. He hung up and said, “Sorry to break this off, Nick, but I have to meet a customer. How about dinner tonight?”

“Sure.”

He walked me to the door. “I’m sorry about this Lindsey situation. Didn’t mean to drop a bomb on you.”

“Hey, Lindsey’s always been a box of surprises.”

“Surprises aren’t good. I always say it’s best to get things out in the open. So tonight I’ll treat you to some Flor de Cana, best rum in Central America. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

“Deal.”

“Call me around seven,” he said, then closed the office door.

My smile faded as I headed down the hall, past the chapel, wondering if there was enough rum in all of Nicaragua to get Guillermo talking about the ten million dollars the FBI seemed to think he was worth.