The Guyana Contract

by Rosalind McLymont

  “Le Quartier Noir? You mean there’s actually a neighborhood here where all the black people live? I don’t recall seeing anything about that in the stuff I read about Marseille.”

  “Yes, there is a Quartier Noir. And of course it wouldn’t be listed in the kind of books you would read. It isn’t exactly a tourist attraction, you see.”

  “Will I have time to see it, though? I have an early afternoon train.”

  “You will have time. I promise.”

  Theron St. Cyr turned out to be the kind of personal guide that the well heeled would happily dig deep into their pockets to hire. Aromas of palm oil and lamb stew and grilled fish announced their arrival in Le Quartier Noir. Dru stopped several times to stare, not so much at the buildings, but at the people. She guessed that they were immigrants from North and West Africa. They did not look like Arabs, like the North Africans she had met. These were black-skinned Africans.

  She saw no women.

  The men were very tall—over six feet, many of them—and lanky, with small, cloudy, deep-set eyes. Many of the older ones wore their native clothing—long, brightly colored robes and pointed, soft white shoes that looked like slippers. Some of them had that familiar empty look on their faces.

  A shadow fell across Dru’s face. She had seen these streets before, with their conflation of colors all along the sides. And black, blue-black, faces bearing every mark of people who had made friends with time from sitting on the steps and learning how each hour walks, and where it goes and why. Oh, yes. These streets. These prophets. She had seen them before.

  “Makes you think of Harlem, doesn’t it?” St. Cyr said, looking at her intently.

  “No,” Dru replied, shaking her head. “It makes me think of Flatbush. Flatbush, Brooklyn.”

  They walked in silence for a while, Dru absorbing everything, her heart racing a little with the emotion of being so physically close to an Africanness she had never before experienced.

  A man approaching them from the opposite direction caught her attention, a tall, lean man with erect shoulders, dressed all in black. His hair, jet black and shiny, fell in waves to his shoulders. He walked with long, purposeful strides, his hands cutting long swathes forward and back, forward and back, with soldier-like precision.

  He seemed to be staring right at Dru. It was not a friendly stare. Hypnotized, Dru kept her gaze on him as the distance between them shrank. The man looked like a very dark-skinned European. Not a white person with a deep tan. A naturally dark-skinned Caucasian.

  He could be North African. Algerian, maybe? There were lots of them around Marseille.

  Or maybe he’s a gypsy, Dru thought. Back home he would have passed easily for Hispanic.

  Now they were close enough to each other for Dru to see that the man’s eyes were as black as his hair. Obsidian eyes, Dru thought. She had read that description somewhere. And boils on his face. Ugh! Lots of them.

  And yet he was so striking.

  Dru’s eyes remained as riveted on the stranger’s face as his were on hers. Sunlight bounced off the gold chain around his neck.

  They were almost abreast of each other when the man suddenly shifted his gaze to St. Cyr. Hatred shot from his eyes then. Hatred so raw that Dru caught her breath and instinctively moved closer to St. Cyr, who slipped his arm around her waist and drew her closer still. Firmly, wordlessly.

  Their hips touched. Dru glanced up at him. He was looking directly into the man’s eyes. His face was calm, but there was a small smile on his lips that seemed mocking. Not once did his eyes leave the man’s face, though Dru was certain that he was aware of her own eyes on him.

  No one had broken stride.

  These guys know each other, Dru thought. Goosebumps tickled along her arms and spine. She returned her gaze to the stranger. His scowl had deepened. His eyes hurled thunderbolts at St. Cyr and he brushed roughly against him as he passed, muttering something in a language that Dru did not recognize. St. Cyr kept on walking, not saying a word. He kept his arm casually around Dru’s waist for several steps, then eased it away.

  Dru could not help stopping and turning to watch the man with the obsidian eyes as he strode rapidly away without looking back. “Wow! That was weird!” she exclaimed, still staring at the man’s back. “That is one nasty son of a bitch. Do you know him?”

  She turned back expectantly to St. Cyr, but he had walked ahead a few paces. Hearing her question, he stopped and waited for her to catch up with him.

  “Well? Do you know who he is?” Dru said impatiently as she caught up to him.”He said something to you in a funny language. And he looked at you as if he could kill you. Who is he?”

  St. Cyr shoved his hands into his pockets and hoisted his shoulders negligently.”He’s just one of those crazies you find in this neighborhood. Forget it.”

  Dru looked at him quizzically. St. Cyr returned her gaze, but remained mute.

  Dru shook her head and sighed. It was obvious that he would not relinquish whatever it was that he was holding back.

  She shrugged, annoyed. Oh, well. It’s your problem. I’ll be out of here soon. Aloud she said, “Well, if you say so. You know these folks better than I do.”

  “Yes, I do. So come on, let’s move on. There’s a lot to see yet.”

  It didn’t take long for Dru to become engrossed again in the sights of Le Quartier Noir. She asked many questions and St. Cyr answered them all. More than once his answers showed a sensitivity that gave her pause, and she would glance at him quizzically.

  St. Cyr pretended not to notice. His thoughts were still on the man with the black eyes and gold chain. They had crossed paths before.

  He hid a smile.

  Yeah, you lose again, Ramy, my friend. You can curse me all you want. I still got to her first. This one is mine.

  2

  Lower Manhattan, New York August 20, 1986

  “Okay, gentlemen, here’s what’s before us. There’s nothing official on The Street yet, but analysts are worried that a crisis is looming for European and American carmakers. Not enough people are buying cars.The Japanese are in the game with blood in their eyes. The Arabs have us by the balls again with their manipulation of oil prices. That’s sending gasoline prices through the roof and forcing people to limit their driving, compounding the car sales situation. Detroit is shitting bricks. Anyway, a few government types on both sides of the pond have tuned into what the analysts are thinking and they’re not happy at all, to put it mildly. They have every reason not to be. As we all know, auto manufacturing is the heartbeat of the European and American economies, but most especially ours. If plants begin to close, the chain reaction can hurl us into a crevice so deep it will make the Depression look like we merely stumbled into a ditch.”

  Lawton Pilgrim, CEO of the world-renowned consulting firm Pilgrim, Boone and Associates, paused and let his gaze move slowly around the mirror-bright mahogany conference table. He settled it for a few moments on each of the five faces turned toward him.

  The men around the table met his gaze with equanimity. The legendary Pilgrim stare was not meant to intimidate but to embrace, to excite, to challenge.

  These men knew this. They were the firm’s keenest analytical minds, the innermost circle of an institution whose reach extended into the most hallowed chambers of the world’s financial and political power brokers.

  Pilgrim Boone was the juggernaut these power brokers unleashed in times like these, when trouble was nothing more than the faintest flicker on their mental radar screens. The firm made sure such flickers faded and died before they became persistent blips. Drawing on its massive network of “associates” in key cities on every continent—even, it was said but never proven, behind the Iron Curtain—the firm delivered reports, studies, forecasts, and recommendations to clients for fees that made the national budgets of most Third World countries look like an inner-city child’s allowance.

  The men and women who gathered intelligence for Pilgrim Boone were an invisible army oper
ating silently in their respective areas of expertise. Their identities were unknown even to each other. Ostensibly employed elsewhere, they did their work for Pilgrim Boone on the side. They were former and current government officials, university professors, graduate students, union officials, scientists, experts in every industry. Some were even journalists.

  Pilgrim Boone’s clients never asked how or from where the information delivered to them was gleaned. They simply took each word as gospel and acted accordingly. They benefited from the results of those actions. They were grateful. They were loyal. They slept well.

  “A client has asked us to come up with a plan to get auto production lines rolling faster, a way to put more American and European cars, buses, and trucks on the roads. Not just in our own country, but in every corner of the world—North, South, East and West,” Pilgrim continued.

  “East? Did you say East? Are we going to overrun Moscow with Mustangs now? Chevys in Kazakhstan? Surely you jest, Lawton!” Grant Featherhorn’s eyes twinkled as he looked around, laughing, to see if anyone else was enjoying his observation as much as he was.

  No one was, although they all smiled, including Pilgrim.

  Pilgrim ran a very relaxed ship. He understood and encouraged contrarian thinking. He himself, ten miserable years after graduating from Notre Dame, had finally chucked aside the family’s proclivity for public service and launched the consulting business with Carter Boone, his best friend in high school and college. He used his family name and clout to snare their first clients and, instead of scrambling for a Washington, D.C., headquarters address, as everyone else in the business seemed to be doing, he looked for space in the Wall Street area.

  “I’m going there because money is the root of all power and I want to be near it,” he told his father, who had long ceased to be surprised by anything his eldest son did or said.

  “Near to which one? Money or power?”

  “Both.”

  “Oh, give it a rest, Lawton. You were born into money and power. You don’t have to move an inch to be near either,” his father, a U.S. senator from Massachusetts, had said with a yawn. Born working class, his father had married into a wealthy family and had used his wife’s fortune and connections to fulfill his political ambitions. “If you want to go wallow in that old pig run then just shut up and do so. Don’t try to justify it with grandiose pronouncements about money and power.”

  It was the most he could expect by way of a blessing from his father. But it was a blessing, nonetheless, he had sighed with relief. He couldn’t stand family conflicts.

  The mind was not meant to be straitjacketed, was another of Lawton Pilgrim’s favorite sayings. Keep it loose and free and you get the best it has to give.

  Grant Featherhorn, more fondly known as The Flower Child, took that philosophy to heart. He lit up a joint in his office three times a day—at eight in the morning, which was an hour after he arrived at work; at noon on the dot; and at six in the evening, half an hour before he went down to the town car that chauffeured him between his townhouse in Brooklyn’s Park Slope and the firm’s headquarters on Water Street. He himself never drove. A phobia since childhood, he would say to his colleagues, waving the subject away without further explanation. And riding the noisy, smelly, sardine-can-like subway was out of the question.

  Pilgrim’s smile widened at Featherhorn’s feigned mockery, deepening the creases in his tanned face.

  “You laugh, Grant. But before this century is over, American and Western European cars will be rolling in those very streets. Mark my words,” he said amiably.

  “Oh, I don’t disagree with you at all, Lawton,” Featherhorn said. “It just sounds funny, coming from a man your age. So many of your peers are so busy hating Communism that they can’t see that whole bloc of the world as a market for Western goods and services. The doddering old farts.” Pilgrim chuckled and ran his fingers through his thick, salt-and-pepper hair.

  “Don’t forget hearses. Nobody mentions hearses.”

  The nasal whine of Wilfred Cunningham cut the air. “It’s always cars and buses and trucks. But I submit to you that with the structure and discipline of colonial rule removed, the death rate in these newly sovereign nations will skyrocket. Why? Greed and power struggles, followed by the decline of social services. They’ve already started to kill each other. Hearses, my friends. There’s growth in hearses and the limousines that trail them.”

  Cunningham’s labyrinthine analyses invariably took him much farther out on the proverbial limb than his colleagues.

  “Brilliant timing, Willy,” Pilgrim said.

  Everyone laughed. Pilgrim was in his fifties and had the aura of a man in his prime. A third-degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do and a vegetarian, he was in better shape and better health than any of his juniors around the table and they knew it.

  “Seriously, Willy. We know that every human being is the potential owner of a car, but how many individuals can own a hearse, or would even be interested in owning one, for chrissakes?” Damian Bettencourt, a third-generation Syrian American and the only non-Anglo-Saxon in Pilgrim Boone’s Inner Circle, sounded irritated.

  “Who’s talking about getting people to own hearses? I’m simply saying we should be selling fleets of them to these emerging nations!”

  “Oh, stuff it with the hearses, Willy! I still say we made a big mistake when we didn’t bring that Japanese kid into the firm. Those old fogies in the boardroom are so anti-Japanese they can’t see any advantage in having Japanese on staff. With a project like this we could use some Nipponese minds on our side. Japan is our firm’s weakest link, if you ask me,” grumbled Tom Briggs.

  Briggs was the real brain behind the thesis that had won his college professor a Nobel Prize in economics. He could not prove that the original work was his, so he had seethed in silence when the prize was announced. He suspected, but never tried to confirm it, that it was his girlfriend at the time, now his wife, who had forced the professor to relinquish his coveted chair at the university by setting him up in a masterfully devised sexual harassment trap.

  The professor, a married father of three, was given the option of going quietly into retirement or facing a scandal in the press. Briggs’s girlfriend-turned-wife never mentioned the matter, except to exclaim, “Well, whaddya know,” when Briggs told her about the professor’s departure.

  During his recruitment interview with Pilgrim, Briggs found himself speaking for the first time of his work on the prize-winning thesis. He spoke without bitterness or self-pity. He was simply recounting the facts of his life. Pilgrim believed him.

  “Oh, I don’t know if we need to focus that heavily on Japan right now, Tom. If Europe and America go down, Japan will tumble right along with them,” said Jocelyn Raeburn.

  Raeburn had a way of glaring at everyone as if he expected them to start giggling at his name.

  “Everything the Japanese know about manufacturing cars they’ve stolen from the Europeans, starting with Mitsubishi ripping off the Fiat in 1917. Datsun, which we know as Nissan today, ripped off the Austin in 1930 and did the same to BMW in the 1960s. And it was America—the Pentagon, no less—that gave Japanese car manufacturers a new lease on life in the 1950s when they were in the toilet. Toyota was so broke it wasn’t even making cars any more, just trucks. Then the Pentagon decided to order trucks from Toyota. Fifteen hundred, I believe it was. Why? Ah, the way the mind of Washington works! Thank God we’re beginning to learn that business and politics should mix. It was right after the war. Japan was still weak and the geniuses in D.C. were worried about Communism spreading from North Korea. So they pumped money into the auto industry as part of the plan to shore up the Japanese economy. It began with that order of trucks. The boom came a decade later.”

  “But that’s precisely the point. However they may have started out, there’s no stopping them now. The way the Japanese government works hand in hand with industry, I bet you they’ve already worked out all kinds of strategies to slice into the
market,” countered Briggs.

  “He’s right. The Japanese are making small cars and people seem to love them. They make a lot more sense than our gas guzzlers,” said Featherhorn.

  “It’s not Japanese carmakers and the Arabs that we should be worrying about. The Arabs can’t keep up this oil thing forever and the word is that there’s a lot more oil in Africa than there is in all of the Arabian Peninsula. We’ve simply got to start selling more cars and trucks and buses to the Third World. Make them our customers no matter what their economic situation is. That’s where the population numbers are. We’ve got to make it so that they not only have to buy, but it’s also easy for them to buy,” said Raeburn.

  Raeburn’s colleagues knew better than to say anything about his first name in his presence. But they took him to task about his refusal to speak to his father because of it. The way Raeburn told it, his father had given in to his lunatic mother who had so craved a daughter that she refused to believe that the baby the nurse brought to her in the hospital was a boy. She named him Jocelyn, a name she said she just had “a thing” for.

  “Let it go, J. You’ve proven your point by becoming the man you are today. It’s the man behind the name that counts. Have a heart and talk to the old man, for God’s sake,” his colleagues would plead.

  And, “Goddamn it, J., you won’t be a man until you get that monkey off your back.”

  It was like talking to a brick wall. He had not spoken to his father since his last and most glorious defense-of-manhood fight, when he was in the sixth grade and broke the nose of one of his classmates. He was expelled immediately, but he had swaggered out of the principal’s office with his chest sticking out and his head held high. For, as the Little League coach who had intervened in the fight hauled him by the scruff of his neck to the principal’s office, he had seen respect in the eyes of his classmates for the first time. Later that night, his father had whipped him with an old leather belt, yelling about the shame and disgrace his firstborn had brought on his household for behaving like a common Irish street brawler and predicting that he would turn out just like his drunken grandfather. After his parents went to bed, Jocelyn walked out of the house with two stuffed duffel bags and went to live with the same grandfather on the poor side of town. He left a note for his parents saying where he was. They neither called nor went to get him. He knew exactly what they were thinking: he was bad news for his younger siblings, so good riddance. Jocelyn did not care. He loved his grandfather.