either. Calderon said, “It’s Consuela Holdings money. It’s there. Let’s move on.”
“Consuela? There’s no cash flow from Consuela. It’s a speculative outside investment. Why’re we claiming it as an asset against which we’re proposing to borrow?”
Calderon chuckled. “My little girl’s a financial genius now. A year ago she couldn’t tell an asset from a baby buggy and now she’s running the business for me. Kids, huh?” Everyone around the table had a good laugh at that, and now Calderon stared at her with his special macho gaze until she dropped her eyes and he said, “When I want your advice I’ll ask for it, understand? Now, Oscar, let’s get this finished.”
Calderon observed his daughter shrink into submission, which reaction made him feel somewhat more in control, and after the meeting he retired to his office, having told the secretary to hold calls. He sat behind his desk squeezing a little red ball said to be good for relieving tension and thought about the real problem, the one closely related to the $5.5 million the stupid girl had mentioned. Clearly, someone had killed Fuentes, and this someone was now trying to threaten him by last night’s vandalism. Fuentes had been torn by what was supposed to have been a big cat, an obvious scam, and someone had marked his property, as if by a big cat. They were trying to frighten them away from the Puxto, that was clear enough, and therefore it was necessary to find the people who were doing this and stop them or frighten them off. He had applied fear before this, including physical fear on occasion, and he understood that once the decision was made, there was no point in holding back. He dialed a number in Colombia, not the one he had used some days ago, but a special one, a cell phone, for emergencies only.
“Yes?” said the quiet voice.
“Hurtado?”
“Yes.”
“Calderon. Look, the situation we talked about the other day? I think you need to be involved.”
“I’m listening.”
“There was an incident at my house last night. It’s connected with the death of Fuentes, I think.”
“Someone contacted you?”
“No, just some vandalism, a warning. The marks of a big cat, just like there were around Fuentes’s body.”
A hissing silence; then, “And what is it you expect me to do about it, Yoiyo?”
Calderon took a deep breath. “Well, you know they killed one of us and threatened me. This is not the work of some little environmentalist cabron. This has to come from your end, despite what you said before.”
“Really? What about the man and his Indian at Fuentes’s office?”
“A distraction. These environment crazies, they climb up and live in trees, they drive spikes, at worst maybe a bomb, and then they’re all over the papers with their manifestos. This is different. Forgive me for saying so, but it has a Colombian feel to it.”
“A Colombian feel?”
“Yes!” Calderon’s voice rose. “They tore Antonio to pieces, goddamnit! They ripped the heart from his body, his liver…Americans don’t do things like that.”
“No, that’s true. But calm yourself, my friend. I’m sure something can be arranged. We need to find who’s doing this business and make them stop, this is the important thing, yes?”
“Of course. So, you’ll organize this in some way?”
“I will. My people will be in touch with you. And Yoiyo? You’ll let me handle this quietly, yes? No publicity, no fuss, and no contact with the authorities. Do we understand each other?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Good. My best regards to your family.”
The line went dead. Calderon wiped his face with his handkerchief. It was some minutes before he trusted his legs to carry him to the little bar in his office.
Victoria Calderon returned to her much smaller office, where there was no bar. Her body was damp with a nasty fear-sweat. She plucked at her clothes and wished for a shower. She sat behind her desk and tried to work. The words and figures danced wrongly across the page, and she mouthed an unaccustomed curse, and another, and then gave vent to her quite considerable store of Spanish profanity, learned mainly during her brief marriage, but not of course loud enough to be heard through the flimsy walls of her office. Yes, it was still true: he could with a word and a sneer turn her into the brainless ornament of his fancy.
Now, almost without thought, she found her fingers punching the buttons of her phone, and in a moment she was listening to the warm, humorous voice of her favorite person in the world, her mother’s crazy sister, Eugenia Arias, who, blessed with a perfect ear for tones of woe suppressed, cut through the attempted small talk with “What’s he done to you now?”
After listening to her niece for some time, she said, “Come down to Eskibel’s and I’ll buy you a drink. Three drinks. Then we’ll go to the fronton and make piles of cash, and then maybe we’ll both get lucky with apelotero.”
Victoria giggled. “Oh, God, I should! It’d drive him crazy.”
“It’d serve him right, the bastard. Oh, come! You can be here in half an hour. We can grab a bite and be in our seats by seven. Yes?”
Victoria actually thought about it for a long moment. Aunt Eugenia, the younger of the two sisters, was a jolly, fleshy woman, as unlike her sib as nature and temperament could arrange. She was unmarried, screwed around with low, beautiful, worthless men, drank copiously, kept an antique Jaguar saloon with a chauffeur to drive it, and made, to the dismay of her family, an excellent living as a professional jai alai gambler. She was tolerated at the larger family gatherings, but Yoiyo Calderon did not approve of her, and so his daughter was strongly discouraged from her society.
Victoria answered, “I don’t know…I’d have to lie to him, and to my mom, and he’d find out and then I’d be in the doghouse for weeks…”
“What, he’s going to ground you? Vicki, I have news for you: you’re an adult. You’re twenty-eight. Let him kick you out. You’ll move in with me, I’ll teach you to bet jai alai. You’ve got a good head for figures, you’d be a natural at it.”
A laugh caught Victoria by surprise, the suggestion was so outrageous, so not her. She changed the subject and they talked on, of family and Eugenia’s louche life, and when they ended the conversation, Victoria felt herself again. Which was? She didn’t quite know, but it was not as an escapee like Eugenia, she decided as she turned again to the close-ranked numbers, not escape, but victory. Her father’s daughter, after all.
There was a plaque at the base of the tree, placed by the South Florida Horticultural Society. This plaque proclaimed it the largest tree in Florida, and informed the interested that it was a FICUS MACROPHYLLA, a banyan fig, and had been planted around 1890 by a minister to provide shade for his church. It still provided shade to the large brick-built steepled building that had replaced the tin-roofed original, and also, in the late afternoon, to the low, modern structure that housed the Providence Day School, K through six. The tree covered an area the size of a big-league baseball diamond, a vast ball of dark green elongate shiny leaves suspended over dozens of trunks and subtrunks, smooth and gray as elephants, and in the spooky cloud-stopped light of this afternoon, like elephants these seemed to march with infinite slowness across the lawn that surrounded it. There was a wooden bench established under one of its boughs, slung cleverly between two living buttresses. Upon this sat Miss Milliken, the first-grade teacher, who read to her class from Tik-Tok of Oz, a special treat at the end of the day. The parents knew to collect their children there on paradisiacal afternoons such as this, and there was a small circle of adults, almost all well-turned-out local matrons or young nannies, standing around the clump of sitting children, listening while the chapter was read out. The sole listener who was neither matron nor nanny was Jimmy Paz.
The book closed, the children sprang up and began to chatter, the parents moved in. Some grabbed their youngsters and moved off in a determined manner, to tightly scheduled activities meant to build up resumes. The students at Providence Day came from a social stratum that did not believe in wasting the unforgiving minute, whose members believed that it was never too early to sacrifice to the gods of success. Jimmy Paz was not one of these either, nor were several others, who demonstrated by their costumes and vehicles that they were the heirs of the former indigenes of Coconut Grove-the laid-back, the artistic-even if wealthy enough to afford Providence’s stiff fees. These gathered around Miss Milliken to chat, to discuss their children briefly, to hang out with one another in
