by James Flint
Luggie looked at her for the first time since the exchange had begun. ‘Bea …’
‘Well it’s true.’
Jamie looked wounded. ‘You know why that is.’
Bea refused to be chastened. ‘It doesn’t change things Jamie. If he pulls a fast one you’ve lost your boat and a few years of your life. But me and Luggie …’ She paused, her voice catching. ‘You tell him Lugs.’
Luggie rubbed his face, his tanned skin lent a sepia cast by the light from the low-energy bulb that hung from the ceiling. ‘Bea’s pregnant, Jamie.’ He took Bea’s hand and cracked a smile broad enough to dam the course of the argument. ‘I’m going to be a dad!’
But this news, momentous though it was, changed nothing, merely rubbing in the fact that they had to make the Club work. The question of how exactly to achieve that remained. Bea suggested offering diving as well as surfing, but there were already two dive shops in the resort and the costs of set-up and insurance would be huge, plunging them further into debt even if they were able to borrow the money. Luggie suggested paragliding, which he’d spent a season doing in Guatemala and loved, and that seemed like a better idea, although how much extra cash it would generate in the short term was debatable.
Whatever solution was suggested, it all in the end came down to the same thing: more guests, spending more money. And the best mechanism for achieving that in the short term seemed to be the extra cabanas and Jamie’s parties, along with a plea to Gomez to extend the terms of their loan. So the next day Jamie called the Brazilian’s mobile, left a message suggesting a meeting, then threw himself into the preparations for the latest event, which was to be his biggest and most elaborate yet.
A week of charging back and forth to Fortaleza, then, of meeting flights and getting people settled, averting crises, organising the music, erecting the awnings, sorting the bar. By the day of the party he was exhausted, and he had slipped away to his cabin to grab an hour’s siesta when Gomez, with his usual uncanny sense of timing, knocked on the door.
‘Hey my friend,’ he grinned, his white teeth breaking through his puckered, plum-coloured face.
Rubbing his hands through his hair in an attempt to scrape back his tiredness, Jamie invited him in and fished two bottles of Sagres from his icebox. Gomez looked tired too, Jamie thought: tired and preoccupied, as if work was on mind. Which it probably was, Gomez being a man who was never seen out of his suit, even when he ventured onto the beach.
‘You coming along tonight?’ Jamie asked.
‘I must apologise – I have a lot of business still to do today, then I will be looking forward to my bed! I think the same is true of you, my friend. I woke you from your siesta.’ Although Gomez spoke with a heavy accent his English was excellent. Jamie had long ago given up attempting to speak Portuguese to him.
‘I’ve done nothing but run round after thirty new arrivals since last Thursday. Who knew that people could do so little for themselves? I feel like a tour guide.’
Gomez laughed and took a slug of his beer. ‘Your guests will love you for it.’
‘I hope so. Did you get my message?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘So then you know what I want to talk about. Shall we sit?’
There was one white plastic patio chair in the cabana, placed next to a bamboo chest that doubled as a table. Jamie perched on the edge of the bed and gestured to Gomez that he should take it.
‘Look,’ he said, when both of them were sitting. ‘I don’t want to mess you around, but the fact is we’re not in a position to start paying down our loan.’
Gomez blinked, reached into his jacket pocket, took out a pack of cigarettes, and glanced at Jamie for permission to smoke.
‘We’re getting there,’ Jamie said, passing the Brazilian a foil ashtray. ‘We’re just not there yet. I can show the Club’s accounts if you like.’
‘And how much longer do you think you need? To start to pay?’
‘We’re not sure. Another six months? A year maybe?’
Gomez drew heavily on his cigarette and shifted his weight forward, elbows resting on knees, until he was staring right down into the battered foil ashtray on the top of the chest.
‘This makes things very difficult for me, Jamie. I have commitments of my own. Other people who need money from me. I am not a bank.’
‘I know. I realise that. I’m – we’re – very sorry. We didn’t think it would take this long.’
Gomez removed the cone of ash from his cigarette by slowly rotating it against the rim of the ashtray.
‘I have been generous, yes?’
Jamie nodded. ‘That’s not the issue. How about if we start paying off the interest? That’s something we could definitely discuss.’
‘It does not solve my problem. I have other projects, Jamie. Projects that need cash. They are waiting – and they cannot wait.’
Jamie took a swig of his beer and said nothing. He didn’t know what to say. He felt light, much as he had the day he’d left Caitlin at the door of the pool house in Shelfield, or the day he’d dug up the bale from its hiding place in the jungle, or the time when the Chiriquí had been caught in a squall and pushed into a situation that was way beyond his and Luggie’s ability to control. These were moments when he’d discovered that he was capable of relinquishing the process of conscious decision and moving into a space beyond panic, beyond fear, beyond even exhilaration, a space in which he was aware of one thing only: the need to keep pointing straight into the wave, whatever the wave was made of, and however big it might happen to be.
‘Here.’ Gomez reached into his other jacket pocket and produced a small parcel, wrapped in brown paper, which he placed on Jamie’s end of the chest. ‘You could help by doing something for me.’
Jamie looked from the man to the package, then walked over, picked it up, and unwrapped it. Inside, tightly encased in clingfilm, was more cocaine than he’d seen since he’d left Punta Allen.
‘What is this?’ he said, his pulse already racing.
‘What is it?’ There was a mocking tone in Gomez’s voice that Jamie had never heard before.
‘I meant, what do you want me to do with it?’
‘You are having a party. There are many people coming, with a lot of money to spend. Help them to spend it.’
‘And what do I have pay you?’
Gomez lit another cigarette. ‘For this one? Nothing. This is my gift. Whatever you sell, I take it off your debt when you give me the cash. But the next one you buy, and you pay down the account with the profits. Is not that fair?’
‘What if I don’t want to go around dealing branco to my guests?’
‘Then I think maybe it is time you leave Rosaventos, and go find someone else’s money to take.’
—————
For a while, it worked. The wealthy young fun-seekers who washed through Rosaventos were generally ready to sprinkle a little powder on their confections of sun, sea and sex. It was easier and infinitely less risky for them to buy from Jamie than go hunting randomly for a dealer in the bars of Fortaleza, and the cash the trade generated kept Gomez at bay. On top of that, many of the people who bought his drugs or attended Jamie’s beach raves went on to sign up for one of his classes or stay at Club Vayu, even if they hadn’t been his guests the first time around. And many more told their friends, who told their friends, and this word of mouth along with a steadily growing volume of pieces in the press helped keep the cabanas full and the business afloat.
Bea had her baby – a little boy she and Luggie named Finn – and the resort grew in reputation and scale. They finished the extra cabins and Luggie bought his paragliding kit and trained a couple of local kids as instructors. They extended the restaurant, had a website built to help handle bookings – still tricky because of their continued reliance on satellite comms – and picked up reviews in Condé Nast Traveller and some in-flight magazines.
Then, in the late Nineties, out of the blue, Sean got in touch. He’d
been trawling the web for a couple of years for news of his estranged half-brother, finding every Jamie Blake in the world but the one he wanted. But one day one of the leads turned out to be real, and there on Sean’s screen was a piece on Rosaventos from the Travel section of the online edition of the New York Times, along with a photograph of the man he was looking for.
He sent an exploratory email, Jamie responded, and soon after that Sean made the trip to Brazil. The day he arrived he had sat with his half-brother on the low wall that curtained the beach – both of them barefoot, Sean’s toes pulpy and grub-like, Jamie’s polished brown and smooth as pebbles by the constant interaction with sun, sand and sea – while Jamie reeled off the list of achievements: the club’s windsurf shop, Day-Glo racks of boards and sails arrayed in the long lean-to beside it; an open, palm-thatched structure with an adjacent adobe block which together housed the restaurant and bar; beyond that, in a grove of cashew trees and carnauba, a group of cabanas: ten for guests, one for Bea and Luggie, and one right at the back, half-buried in the palm grove, in which Jamie lived. On the other side of the wall, of course, stretched the main attraction: the sumptuous vista of the Rosaventos bay, on whose beach knots of people were enjoying games of volleyball or frisbee while out on the water kite-surfers flipped on the breakers and sailboards sliced to and fro. And in the distance, boss of it all, the mammary swell of la Duna do Por do Sol pulsed with the heat of the day.
Sean’s visit changed things. Once it had been established that both he and Jamie were equally intent on keeping their father completely out of the picture, they were able to pick up more or less where they’d left off over a decade before – with one crucial difference. During the course of Sean’s stay they discovered that, perversely, the long period of separation had actually brought them closer than they had ever been as teenagers. Back then they’d been placed together by circumstance, and although they’d occupied the same house their lives had hardly touched. Now, however, they had a shared history, and Sean was in Rosaventos because they had chosen to share it some more.
So it was that Jamie found himself telling Sean how money Sheila had given him had got him as far as Punta Allen, where for a long time he’d basically just sat on the beach and contemplated suicide. When it transpired he didn’t have the guts to keep swimming out to sea until he was too tired to get back, or rig himself a gibbet in a convenient palm tree, he’d tried to do it by just giving up: first, by running out of money and then, when he could no longer pay for a room or even a hammock on the beach, by walking as far he could down the coast until he reached the lighthouse. Poking around with the vague aim of getting inside it so he could throw himself off the top, he found the water tap. Then he found the hut in the trees, surrounded by a more or less unlimited supply of coconuts. Then, without really consciously deciding to do it, he’d gone back to the resort and begged or filched a machete, some fishing kit, and various other bits and pieces to help him get by, and soon he was spending the days in a kind of eternal present, catching fish and combing the shoreline for driftwood for his fire and any flotsam that might prove to be useful.
Then the bale of cocaine had shown up, and the Russian, and Bea and Luggie, and then, down here in Brazil, the mysterious Gomez, and then Sean, and now here they were, sitting talking on the wall at the Club, drinking a beer and watching the sunset, and feeling for the first time like brothers.
—————
Some months after Sean’s visit, Jamie met Gomez on the terrace of a restaurant overlooking the Praia de Iracema, Gomez dressed in his standard business attire of pressed short-sleeved white shirt, dark slacks and black leather slip-ons, Jamie in jeans, Havaianas and T-shirt.
‘This was a very good idea, Jamie,’ Gomez enthused, as the waiter poured them their wine. ‘We should do this more often.’
‘We should.’
They tucked into bowls of moqueca, the house speciality, a creamy stew laden with chunks of swordfish and prawn, and chatted about Vayu, about the tourist trade, how much Fortaleza was changing, how much Rosaventos had already changed.
Jamie waited till the food was finished and their espressos arrived before coming to the point.
‘I need more cabanas, Gomez. A bigger surf shop. Better facilities. More staff. We need to grow. I want to buy more land.’
Gomez nodded, realising now what the lunch was about.
‘And you have money for this?’
‘I can get money,’ Jamie said. It was something he had discussed with Sean. He’d have died before taking a penny of Tony’s, and of course the inverse was also true – Tony would have killed him rather than give him one. But Sean had funds of his own now. During his stay they’d done some work together on the Club’s financial projections, and he was interested in coming on board.
Gomez nodded, but his expression was one of sadness. ‘The problem, Jamie, is not the money you still owe me. And the problem is not that I don’t want to sell you more land. The problem is that there is no land left to sell. When we received the licence to develop Rosaventos, it was very clear: how much area, how many plots, what kind of buildings. And there are inspectors, everything. The idea is for an eco-resort. We are not allowed to build a whole town.’
Jamie nodded. ‘I get all that. But there’s that area at the far western end, just past us, beyond the palm grove. It’s gridded for services, but it’s never been built on. What about that?’
Gomez’s eyes clouded slightly. ‘That area is not up for sale.’
‘Why not? Who owns it?’
‘The developers.’
‘Well can I meet them to discuss it? They’re not doing anything with it. We’ve got more people coming through than we can accommodate. There’s money to be made.’
‘It’s not for sale.’
‘Everything’s for sale, at the right price.’
‘You couldn’t afford the right price,’ Gomez snapped.
‘So there is a price?’ Jamie persisted. ‘Can’t I even send them an email?’
‘Email?’ Gomez slowly shook his head. ‘Jamie. I think you will understand this when I tell you. These are not the kind of people you email.’ To emphasise the point he flared his nostrils and exhaled two columns of smoke, then glanced towards a table on the edge of the terrace, at which three men in their fifties sat enjoying an extravagant lunch. ‘Do you see those guys over there? They’re Porteños. Wealthy guys. Have you any idea what has been happening in Argentina?’
Jamie did – it had been in the news for months. The Argentine economy was in trouble. The pegging of the peso to the dollar by the Convertibility Law and the over-eager adoption of free-market reform had pushed the trade balance into deficit and unemployment up over 12 per cent. By 1998 the country had begun to boil dry. In 1999 GDP fell by 3 per cent. The deficit ballooned. Fernando de la Rúa replaced the ousted Carlos Menem as president, raising taxes and cutting spending radically in an attempt to pull the country out of the slump. As far as Jamie knew, the attempt wasn’t working.
‘My partners, the developers, they do a lot of business in Argentina,’ Gomez continued. ‘Like everyone else, like these guys here, they’re very worried that the government will soon not be able to keep up the payments on its debts.’ He gave Jamie a liquid look. ‘A situation you will be familiar with.’
Jamie ignored this. ‘What happens then?’
‘What happens then is the government shuts down the banks and stops people getting to their money, in case it needs it for itself.’
‘That’s terrible.’
Gomez shrugged. ‘That is South America. Terrible things happen all the time. We are used to it. And so we try to anticipate. The developers, they wish to take their money out of Argentina before this particular terrible thing happens to them.’
‘That’s very sensible of them.’
‘Yes, it is very sensible. So I have been helping. Sometimes that is where I go. Argentina. To help bring out the money.’
Jamie considered this. ‘In ca
sh?’
‘Yes, of course in cash. If we transferred it using banks it would be taxed when it left Brazil and taxed again when it was sent back to Argentina. Taxed twice! If we were even allowed to take it out of the country at all. And so the people whose money this is would only be getting it back after two governments had helped themselves. Tell me, is that fair?’
Jamie didn’t have a chance to say whether it was fair or not, because at that point the waiter cruised up and Gomez asked for the bill.
‘I thought I was supposed to be buying you lunch,’ Jamie protested.
Gomez waved him away and slipped a sheaf of notes into the black leather folder that had been placed on their table.
‘Another time, my friend, another time. Today, it is my honour. It’s a beautiful afternoon. Shall we walk?’
They pushed back their chairs and the Brazilian led the way out of the restaurant, pausing to exchange greetings with the Porteños, clearly people he knew. Jamie hovered patiently – South American hellos were never brief – and when the Brazilian was done they descended the terrace steps, crossed the street, and strolled through the bands of shadow thrown by the palm trees across the sand-dusted pavement of the esplanade. For a period, they walked in silence. Then Gomez spoke.
‘Jamie. The land that interests you.’
‘Yes?’
‘I have a proposition. I told you the problem that my friends have? All that cash from Argentina? I need someone to help me with it.’
‘Help how?’
‘I need a bank account. Somewhere the tax authorities can’t reach out and—’ Gomez made a plucking gesture in the air.
‘You need an offshore account.’
‘Exactly so.’
The skin on Jamie’s shoulders twitched as the mechanics of Gomez’s scheme suddenly became apparent to him.
‘In my name, or in yours?’
Gomez shrugged another of his half-shrugs.
‘Your name would be preferable.’
Jamie let out a small, involuntary laugh.