Country of the Bad Wolfes (18 page)

I
t was in the late summer of that fourth year that John Roger received a packet from New Orleans containing records of Trade Wind business in Mexico prior to his employment. Richard's enclosed note said, “Heres the stuff I promised, sorry it took so long to round it all up but you anyway didnt need it just like you said you didnt to do the good job youve done. Never much cared for working with papers my self. Do with them what you will.” John Roger smiled at the thought that the man surely did keep a promise, no matter how long it might take. He was certain that by this time there could be nothing in the old records of use to him, and he thought of pitching them in the waste can, but it was not in his nature to get rid of any papers he had not at least scanned, so he emptied the packet's contents onto his desktop and began sorting through them.

Among the papers were the Mexican broker's annual invoices to the company for the coffee and tobacco he had received from the various haciendas and in turn shipped to the United States. For the past four years John Roger had sent similar invoices to Richard Davison. It was no surprise to see that the amounts of a commodity delivered to the broker by each of the haciendas had varied from one year to the next, some years more, some years less. With one exception. During the years of the broker's service, the annual delivery of coffee by a hacienda named La Sombra Verde was always the largest of any plantation. And always greater from year to year. It had by far earned more money from the Trade Wind Company than any of the other haciendas. It puzzled John Roger that the name of the company's most productive plantation for those years was only vaguely familiar to him. He referred to his own invoices and saw that La Sombra Verde had not only produced less coffee in each of the past four years than in any of the previous six, but less by
far than all the other plantations. Either the hacienda had undergone a monumental reversal in productivity—coincident with John Roger's assumption of Trade Wind management in Mexico—or the broker had been inflating its figures. He shuffled through the papers and found the broker's annual theft records. The amount of coffee reported as stolen from the warehouse, after delivery by the haciendas, had grown greater every year, but always a little greater than the increase in La Sombra Verde's reported delivery. The broker hadn't been so foolish as to let the amounts match exactly.

Well now. Richard had been cheated, all right, but not in the way he'd thought. The broker hadn't been stealing coffee out of the warehouse. He'd been charging the company for coffee that didn't exist.

Had the owner of the hacienda conspired in the scheme? Every hacendado had to sign the delivery invoice from his own estate. It was not impossible that the broker had substituted forged invoices for the actual, but why do it for the same hacienda every year when it would have been more plausible to forge a different estate's invoice each time? The only answer was collusion between the broker and La Sombra Verde.

The question now was, So what? Richard had been right in his suspicion of being cheated, but he was also right that they could never prove it. And as Richard had also said, even if the broker had been cheating, it was over with—it had stopped with John Roger's takeover of the Mexican branch operations—and the company's only concern should be with the present and the future.

But the swindle was too irksome for John Roger to shrug off. He had heard that the broker, whose name was Guillermo Demarco, was still doing business in Veracruz, but he had never had occasion to meet him. Nor was he acquainted with the patrón of La Sombra Verde, one of only two or three hacendados under contract with the Trade Wind he'd not met, having dealt only with their agents who brought the commodities to port.

The next day, during their weekly lunch date at a zócalo restaurant, he told Patterson all about it. The little Texan didn't know anything about Guillermo Demarco but said he would make discreet inquiries and let John Roger know what he found out. He did, however, know a good deal about La Sombra Verde. The hacienda was more than 250 years old. It encompassed an area of over forty square miles and its nearest boundary to Veracruz lay about thirty-five miles up the coast. But it was bordered in a very odd fashion, flanking the Río Perdido for a mile to either side at the estate's widest point and a half mile to either side at its narrowest, all the way from an upland coffee plantation down to the river's outlet at the Gulf of Mexico. A meandering property that spanned a diverse geography of foothills and pastureland, a portion of rain forest, and a mile of seacoast. The nearest town was
Jalapa, ten rugged miles from its westernmost border.

Originally established by a Spanish nobleman named Valledolid near the end of the sixteenth century, La Sombra Verde had by patrimony passed down through generations of eldest sons, all of them forceful men equal to the responsibilities and duties of a patrón. And then a generation ago it was inherited by twenty-one-year-old Martín Valledolid, an impetuous and romantic young man. He had been the patrón for only a year when he fell in desperate love with a beautiful but spiteful girl named Yasmina Montenegro, who took pleasure in toying with his affections. She lived in Veracruz with her widowed father, a former army officer named Claudio Montenegro. She had always been an exasperation to Claudio and he was as eager to marry her off as she was to be married and gone from him, but he had been hoping for a match of some benefit to himself. In Martin Valledolid's rapture with Yasmina, he recognized a singular opportunity. He denied him the girl's hand except in wager against the title to La Sombra Verde. Martín refused the proposition twice but was too addled by love to refuse it the third time, and in the presence of a dozen astounded witnesses he lost the hacienda on the turn of a card. His family reviled him for his monumental stupidity. His younger brother attacked him and broke his nose and jaw. After a futile series of legal efforts to retain the property, the family disavowed Martín and resettled in Córdoba.

For his part, Claudio said it seemed only fair to permit Martín to marry Yasmina anyway—though he insisted they would have to make their own way through life—and the young man was overcome with gratitude. The couple rented a house in Veracruz, where Martín secured employment as a customs officer at the port. But they had been wed only six months when he discovered Yasmina's cuckoldry. When he confronted her, she laughed and admitted to several lovers, whereupon he throttled her and then drowned himself in the harbor. He left a note accusing Claudio of having cheated him out of the hacienda and he put a curse on the place for as long as it was in Montenegro hands. Claudio made a proper show of public mourning for his daughter and son-in-law and said poor Martín had obviously and tragically become deranged. And in private said good riddance to them both and laughed at Martín's curse.

But no sooner had he gained ownership of La Sombra Verde than its fecund coffee farm, which had always kept the hacienda solvent, was ravaged by a blight that inexplicably exempted every other coffee plantation in the state. In the years since, the farm had never achieved even half of its former yield but had managed to bring in just enough money from year to year to maintain the hacienda's strained subsistence.

The coffee farm's setback was in keeping with the Montenegro family's long history of misfortune. Most of its males died in infancy and its females were disposed to early madness. It was whispered that such propensities were signs of incestuous breeding. A neighboring hacendado named Beltrán did not whisper it softly enough,
however, and when Claudio got wind of what he'd said he rode directly to Beltrán's estate and gave him the choice of a duel or a public admission that he was a liar and a cowardly son of a whore. They met at a riverside meadow at sunrise and fought with pistols at forty paces. Claudio took a minor wound to the hip but his own ball lodged in Beltrán's gut and the man lay in agony for four days before dying. The episode inspired a greater caution among the local gossip-prone, and from then on, the Montenegros were as zealous in defense of their family honor as any Creole clan of classical lineage.

A few years after Claudio acquired La Sombra Verde, his health went into a swift and mystifying decline and he died of an undiagnosed illness. The hacienda then transferred to his son—and its current patrón—Hernán José Montenegro Velasquez. Like his father before him, Hernán had been an officer in the army, intending to make it his career, but upon inheritance of La Sombra Verde he resigned his commission in order to live the life of a hacendado. Also like his father, he had the temper of a red dog. It was said he had killed seven or eight or nine men in duels, some with sword, some with pistol. Hernán's only living son, Enrique, now 17, was reputed to be no less of a hothead but something of a dolt.

“It don't surprise me a bit Hernán would partner with the broker fella in hoodwinking your outfit,” Patterson said. “He's always in bad need of money, and the way I heard it he aint too particular how he gets it. They say he cheats at cards something awful, same as his old daddy did. Mendoza played cards with Hernán once and said it was one time too many.”

The next afternoon Patterson stopped by the Trade Wind office with the information that Guillermo Demarco, prior to going into business as a broker, had been employed as secretary to Hernán Montenegro.

John Roger deliberated for two days. Then wrote a letter to Montenegro, informing him that due to financial improprieties perpetrated against the Trade Wind Company by La Sombra Verde in concert with the brokerage service of Guillermo Demarco, the company was severing its contract with the hacienda.

He then went to Demarco's office on the third floor of a commercial building near the harbor. He introduced himself and told Demarco he was there to collect reimbursement for the substantial overpayments he had received from the company through fraudulent means over a period of six years. He handed him their disparate invoices and theft reports and an estimated bill for the total overpayment.

Guillermo Demarco, sitting behind a spacious desk with his back to a large window framing a view of the harbor, smiled as he scanned the papers. He was a small and tidy man, well seasoned in business dispute. He dropped the papers on the desk and pushed them away with a fingertip. Then leaned back in his chair and said John Roger's so-called evidence of fraud was worthless. Try to make a case in a Mexican
court with this and you will be laughed out of the room, he said. Unless you make the judge so angry for wasting his time that he locks
you
in San Juan de Ulúa.

I might not have much of a legal case, John Roger said, but you and I both know it's true you cheated the company.

Demarco said truth was a beautiful thing but of little significance in commerce or the law. It pained him that the Trade Wind Company was displeased with his former services, but, be that as it may, there was really nothing they could do about it.

I could pass the word around town of what a cheat you are.

Demarco grinned. Oh dear, he said.

John Roger had not expected to collect on the bill, only to let Demarco know that his fraud had not gone undiscovered and to shame him if he could. But as he now understood, the man was immune to shame. And his smugness was galling.

I guess you're right, John Roger said. There isn't much I can do about it legally. But what I most assuredly
can
do, Mr Demarco, is throw you out that window.

He surprised himself no less than he did Demarco. He'd made the threat with an easy confidence that he could make good on it—and with the unmistakable implication that he was leaning toward doing so.