There had actually been some positive reports on his guide work. Once he’d taken a party of Swedish amateur botanists into the Yuturi wilderness, and they’d come back raving about his knowledge of the ecosystem. But another time he’d up and left a group of English horticulturists stranded in the jungle south of Pucallpa because he’d had a vision telling him to go home at once. So the man was a loose cannon, all right, but what choice was there? Who else could knowledgeably guide Scofield and his people and also introduce them to genuine jungle shamans? No one, only Cisco. Vargas had advanced him a hundred nuevos soles to get his hair and that wild beard of his trimmed and to buy a pair of new shoes to replace his disgusting, falling-apart, ankle-high sneakers. Whether he’d actually do any of that, or would even remember that he’d been asked, was strictly a toss-up.
Scofield, ready to leave now, drained his whiskey, smacked his lips, and set down the glass. “All right then, Captain, we have ourselves a deal.” His left hand went into the pocket of his neat plaid shirt, from which he withdrew a blue leather checkbook. His right hand clicked the top of a ballpoint pen and held it, poised, above the top check.
“Five thousand four hundred dollars, correct?”
“Perfectly correct,” said Vargas, his heart in his mouth. Five thousand four hundred dollars would almost cover what was still owed for the Adelita ’s refitting. The pen remained poised.
Write, write, damn it!
Scofield began to scratch away at last. “Let’s round it off and say fifty-five hundred, shall we?”
“Thank you, professor.” Vargas started breathing again. They were actually closing the deal. “I do have many expenses that-”
Scofield completed the check, tore it off with just about the sweetest sound that Vargas had ever heard, but then practically stopped the captain’s heart by drawing it back across the table before Vargas could snatch it.
Now what? “Is something wrong?” he said, managing what he hoped was a smile.
“I wonder, Captain,” Scofield said slowly, gently waving the check, “if you would be interested in earning an additional five thousand dollars?”
Vargas’s heart started up again. At about a hundred beats a minute. “You’re thinking about another cruise?”
“No, not another cruise. Something more in the nature of a simple favor on this one. No additional trouble on your part at all.” He leaned closer, smiling. “I have a proposition in which I think you might be interested, Captain Vargas.”
Twenty minutes later, the two men stood up and shook hands, Vargas having first used a cocktail napkin to surreptitiously wipe the sweat from his palm.
“We’ll look forward to our departure on the twenty-sixth, then,” Scofield said. “Thank you for the drinks.”
“Thank you, professor.”
Once Scofield had left, Vargas flopped back into his soft leather chair. With the thousand soles he was being paid for the mail and cargo deliveries, he would gross almost $11,000, an incredible sum, enough to outfit his beloved Adelita in the manner it deserved, enough for a down payment on a second ship! Yet all the same, an edgy panic, as thick and turgid as cold mud, pressed painfully on his heart. What had he gotten himself into?
He shoved his Inca Kola aside, and limply signaled the barman.
“Bernardo, a double aguardiente.”
FOUR
In the elevator on the way to his fourth-floor room in the Dorado Plaza, Arden Scofield was experiencing a mixture of excitement, relief, and self-congratulation. The arrangement he’d just concluded with Vargas was the final element in an elegantly contrived plan. Had Vargas not agreed, it would all have come to nothing. But really, there hadn’t been much chance of that. His choice of Vargas was hardly random. He had chosen him with care, had meticulously researched him and liked what he had discovered: a cash-pressed boat owner with big dreams for the future; an ambitious, cunning, but basically simple man; not a hardened criminal by any means – certainly not “connected” – but definitely money-hungry and not above the occasional skirting of the law when expedience demanded it. Perfect for what Scofield had in mind.
And what Arden Scofield had in mind had little to do with ethnobotanical expeditions. What he was interested in was the more than $120,000 he would net from the 150 kilos of coca paste “rocks” – the gritty, sand-colored balls of coca-leaf derivative – that the ship would now be carrying. The individually wrapped rocks, grouped into eight-quart, white plastic kitchen garbage bags, would be stowed among the contents of the four dozen sixty-kilo bags of coffee beans that the Adelita was transporting to a riverfront warehouse in Colombia. From there, they would be picked up by runners and taken to Cali, where they would be refined into fifty kilos of “white gold” – pure, top-quality cocaine hydrochloride for the high-end North American trade.
In other words, the esteemed professor was a “ narco” on the side – a drug trafficker, one of the many thousands in Peru that make the international cocaine trade possible. While it is true that the majority of finished cocaine seen on the streets of Europe and the United States is made in Colombia, most of the coca paste from which it is processed comes from Peru, which produces three-quarters of the world’s supply of coca. And well over half of that is grown along the infamous “coca belt” – mainly the Huallaga Valley, the main commercial hub of which is Tingo Maria. Which happened to be where the resourceful professor resided three or four months a year.
On Scofield’s behalf it had to be said that he’d come with no intention of getting involved in the local drug commerce. But when certain opportunities more or less fell into his lap, his perceptions changed. And opportunities weren’t long in coming.
As head of an extension program that trained rain-forest farmers in the techniques of sustainable, ecologically sound farming, he was expected to make periodic trips into the jungle to talk with and evaluate growers of tea, tobacco, and other legal crops. These visits, which generally lasted a week or ten days, were usually made alone, in the university’s four-wheel-drive Land Rover. Interesting anybody else in ten days of backcountry, showerless travel, bouncing over remote, rocky roads in the dry season, or wallowing through them, hubcap-deep, in the rainy season, was an unlikely proposition.
A few days after he had returned from his second such solitary tour, he was invited for coffee to the estate of one Hector Arriaga a few miles north of the city. Scofield had already learned – it was one of the first things that a newcomer had better learn – that one did not idly flaunt the wishes of Hector Arriaga, who was the region’s patron, the local boss representing the Medellin cocaine cartel in the Tingo Maria area. As such, he was both feared as the brutal, dangerous man he was, yet respected as one who was generous with his money, who helped the poor and contributed richly to the church, and who “removed” bothersome petty criminals and crazy or violent outsiders far more efficiently than the police. Known by all, he could eat, drink, buy clothes, and entertain his friends with nothing in his pocket. His name and his reputation were more than enough to guarantee payment.