“Who the hell are you to tell me what I’m worthy of?”
“You renounced your entire heritage. How could you possibly understand things such as honor? Tradition? Duty?”
“How do you know I did that?”
“Is it a lie?”
“And you?” Sagan said. “A kidnapper? Things like honor mean something to you?”
“I have staked my fortune and my life to its fulfillment.”
Zachariah reached into his jacket pocket and found the folded documents. “I need your signature. These will allow lawyers to petition a judge for an order of exhumation on your behalf. I am told it will not be a problem, provided the closest living relative consents. Your daughter has already signed, as the estate’s representative. Of course, she had little choice.”
Sagan refused to accept either the papers or the pen he offered.
“There are but a few minutes remaining for me to call and stop those men.”
He watched as his ultimatum sank in.
Finally, Sagan snatched the pen and papers and signed.
He retrieved them and started to leave. “I will need you at the cemetery, in the morning, at 10:00 A.M. An heir must be present. I will have a representative there on my behalf. Do as instructed. Once the exhumation of your father is complete, your daughter will be released.”
“How do I know that will happen?”
He stopped, turned, and apprised Sagan with a curious glare. “Because I give you my word.”
“I feel better already.”
He pointed at Sagan. “See, there still is some wit left in you.”
“I need my gun.”
He held the weapon up. “You can have it back in the morning.”
“I would have pulled the trigger. I’d be dead right now, if you hadn’t come along.”
He wondered whom Sagan was trying to convince. “Please, do not fret. You will have another opportunity, after tomorrow morning.”
CHAPTER TEN
BÉNE WAITED AS ONE OF HIS MEN DUG OUT THE GRAVE. HIS DOGS had returned and now lay placid beneath the trees, basking in the broken sunlight, satisfied from the hunt. His animals were thorough, a talent bred into them long ago. His mother had told him about the chasseurs from Cuba. Small, swarthy men who’d worn open checked shirts, wide trousers, and light straw hats with shallow crowns and broad rims. But it was their shoes that set them apart. They would skin the thighs and hocks of wild hogs then thrust their feet into the raw hide. The pliant became a kind of short boot, which fit close, and lasted for weeks. They wore crucifixes around their tanned necks and were armed only with a machet, sharpened on one side, the other used to beat the dogs. They first came in 1796, forty of them with their hounds, imported to hunt down the Trelawny Town Maroons.
Which they did.
With no mercy.
Hundreds were slaughtered, and the fear of the dogs was born.
Which he intended to resurrect.
While gangs sought favor with the poorest in Jamaica’s cities, he’d always cast his lot here, in the windward mountains and, to the west, in the leeward Cockpit country, places where Maroons had existed for four hundred years. And though each ran their community through colonels and elected councils, he liked to think of himself as their collective savior, protecting the Maroon way of life. In return, his compatriots provided men and women to staff his many ventures. True, prostitution, gambling, and pornography were covert interests, and they made him millions. But coffee was his passion. All around him, on the slopes for many kilometers, grew shrubs of modest height with glossy, dark green leaves. Every year, sweet-scented, white blossoms sprouted and eventually matured into bright red berries. Once ground and boiled they produced what many said was the finest drink in the world.
Blue Mountain Coffee.
His ancestors had worked the plantations as slaves. He now owned one of the largest and paid their descendants as employees. He also controlled the main distribution network for all of the remaining growers. His father wisely conceived that opportunity, after a devastating hurricane in the 1950s wiped out nearly every grower. A national board was established, with membership limited and criteria for quality, cultivation, and processing decreed. If not grown within sixteen kilometers of the central peak it was Jamaican Prime, not Blue Mountain Coffee. His father had been right—scarcity bred mystique. And through regulation of the product, Blue Mountain Coffee became valued around the world.
And made the Rowe family rich.
His man continued to dig.
Twenty minutes ago his other lieutenant had returned to the trucks to meet more of his men. They now arrived through the trees leading a blindfolded prisoner—late twenties, a mixture of Cuban and African—hands tied behind his back.
He motioned and the younger man was shoved to his knees and the blindfold yanked off.
He squatted close as the man blinked away the afternoon sun.
The man’s eyes went wide when he saw Béne.
“Yes, Felipe. It’s me. Did you think you could get away with it? I pay you to watch the Simon. And watch you do. Except you take his money, and then watch me, too.”
Fear shook the man’s head in violent nervous gestures.
“Listen to me, and listen real good, ’cause everything depends on it.”
He saw that his warning registered.
“I want to know what the Simon be doing. I want to know everything you’ve not told me. Tell wi di trut.”
This turncoat was of the streets, so patois would be his language.
Tell me the truth.
He’d not heard from Simon in nearly two weeks, but he shouldn’t be surprised. Everything he’d learned had only confirmed what he’d long sensed.
Trouble.
The Austrian was enormously wealthy, a philanthropic man obviously interested in Israeli causes. But that did not concern Béne. He had no dog in the fight that was the Middle East. He was interested only in Columbus’ lost gold mine—as, supposedly, was Simon.
“I swear to you, Béne,” Felipe said. “I know nothin’. He tells me nothin’.”
He silenced him with a wave of his hand. “What you take me for? The Simon does not live here. He knows no one in Jamaica. I’m his partner. That’s what he says. Yet he hires you to work for him, too. Okay. I come to you and pay you to tell the Simon only what I want him to know and to tell me what he does. Yet you tell me nothin’.”
“He calls me up, pays me to do some things. I do them and he pays. That’s all, Béne. All.”
The words came fast.
“But I pay you to tell me di trut. Which you not be doing. You better start talkin’ quick.”
“He wants records. Papers from the archives.”
He motioned and one of his men handed him a pistol. He jammed its muzzle into the man’s chest and cocked the hammer. “I give you one more chance. What. Kind. Of. Things.”
Shock filled the prisoner’s eyes.
“Okay. Okay. Béne. I tell you. I tell you.”
He kept the gun firmly against the man’s chest.
“Deeds. He wants deeds. Old ones. I found one. Some Jew named Cohen bought land in 1671.”
That grabbed his attention. “Speak, man.”
“He bought land and all the riverfront property beside it.”
“The name.”
“Abraham Cohen.”
“Why is that so important to the Simon?”
“His brother. His brother was Moses Cohen Henriques.”
That name he knew. A 17th-century Jewish pirate. He captured a great Spanish silver fleet in Cuba, then led the Dutch invasion of Brazil. He ended his life on Jamaica, searching for Columbus’ lost mine.
“Does the Simon know this?”
He shook his head. “He’s out of touch. Gone. Don’t know where. I swear, Béne. Don’t know. I haven’t told him yet.”
“And you not tell me, either. This deed you find. Still in the archives?”