was always stocked with fine foods, the bar top-shelf liquors. Not that it mattered much to him, he drank precious little, but it did matter to his guests. Tre was enjoying a rum and cola.
“This archive is privately owned,” Tre said. “I’ve always wanted to take a look but could not get into Cuba.”
“Why do you think it would be helpful?”
“Some of what I found last night. There were constant references to Cuba in the Spanish documents left in Jamaica. The archivist and I have talked about this Cuban cache before. He’s actually seen it. He said that there are more documents there from the Spanish time than anywhere he knows of.”
“He doesn’t know what you were after, does he?”
“No, Bene. I know better. I assume we can get a car once on the ground?”
“It’s waiting on us.”
“Apparently you’ve been here before.”
“The Cubans, for all their faults, are easy to work with.”
“When I was in the archives last night,” Tre said, “one of the clerks told me about another clerk who’d gone missing. His name is Felipe. Is he the man who stole those documents for you?”
“Not for me. Someone else.”
“He’s dead, isn’t he?”
He wasn’t going to admit to that. Not to anyone. Ever. “Why would you ask me?”
“The clerk told me that he’s never missed work. Young man. Bright. Now he’s gone.”
“Big leap from there to me.”
“Why do you do it, Bene? Why not just go legitimate?”
He’d often asked himself the same thing. Maybe it was his father’s genes swirling inside him. Unfortunately, the lure of easy money and the power it brought was impossible to ignore, though he wished sometimes that he could.
“Should we be having this conversation?” he asked.
“It’s just you and me here, Bene. I’m your friend.”
Maybe so, but he wasn’t a fool. “I do nothing that harms anyone. Nothing at all. I grow my coffee, and I try to stay to myself.”
“That man. Felipe. He might disagree with that.”
He could still feel the glare of the wife’s eyes as he tossed the money on the bed. He’d destroyed her life. Why? For pride? Anger? No. It simply had to be done. Jamaica was a tough place, the gangs many and strong. True, he was not a formal part of that system—he’d like to think that he’d risen above it—but to maintain that status he had to manage fear. Killing that drug don had been part of that. Felipe? Not so much, since no one would ever really know what happened, except the men who worked for him. But that had been the point. If someone like a minor clerk could lie to him with no consequences, what would
Now they knew the price for that mistake.
“It’s unfortunate that the man is missing,” he finally said.
“I read about your father,” Tre said. “He was quite a man. He may have single-handedly created the entire Blue Mountain Coffee industry.”
He was young when his father died, but he remembered some and his mother had told him more. She seemed to remember only the good. His father saw a need to regulate Jamaica’s most valuable export. Of course, the Rowe family benefited. But what was wrong with that?
“My father wanted to find this mine, too,” he told Halliburton. “He was the one who first told me about it.”
He wanted the subject changed. This trip was about the mine, not his family or his business. But he liked Halliburton enough not to become angry at the intrusion.
“And what will you do if the place really exists?” Tre asked.
A gale of turbulence rattled the plane. They were twenty thousand feet over the Caribbean Sea, headed northeast toward Santiago de Cuba, a populous city on the southeast shore. The flight was short and they’d be landing soon.
“Does it exist?” he asked.
“Two days ago I would have said no. Now I’m not so sure.”
