“I’m not selling the plantation.”
Juana clasped her hands together. “Nash, you must; you don’t understand—”
“Don’t worry about her,” Cesar said. “If she’s that stupid, let her dig her own grave.”
“I went to town this afternoon; I sent a wire to a friend in the States, describing everything that’s going on around here, including Escobar’s unhealthy interest in my property. I also sent her a list of government agencies in the U.S. and Colombia to forward it to if anything happens to me.”
My statement made a silent implosion in the room. No one moved; no one said a word. Finally, Josh said, very quietly, “What do you think that will accomplish?”
“If something happens to me, it’ll put the plantation on the DEA’s watch list. And it’s a clue that it wasn’t an accident.”
I didn’t know what good it would do, either, but my back was to the wall and it was a shot in the dark.
Cesar shook his head at Josh. “If you have any influence with this crazy woman, you had better get her out of here now; get her on a plane back to your country. She has signed her own death sentence.”
“I’m going to save this plantation,” I said.
Cesar exploded. “You’re insane!”
Juana put a hand on his arm. “Please, don’t shout at her. She means well.”
He struggled to regain his composure. “You know nothing about growing coffee. A walk in the fields doesn’t make you a cafetero.”
“Let her speak,” Juana said. “She knows more than you think.”
I said, “This place doesn’t need an expert coffee grower. Carlos was the world’s greatest cafetero; Cesar knows how to grow great coffee; that’s not the plantation’s weakness. What’s missing is a businessperson. I ran a coffee store in Seattle, but before that I was an executive with—”
Cesar shook his head. “Listen to me; even if you didn’t get yourself killed, the plantation will go to the bank. Your experience running a little store thousands of miles away doesn’t qualify you to run a plantation in our outlaw country. We don’t do business like the rest of the world.”
“My little store was designed to be a successful flagship of a national chain. Agreements were already being drawn up when people here reached out and brought the roof down on my head.”
“Even if you know how to retail coffee, you don’t know how to grow and sell it on the national market. It’s not a job for a woman.”
“Excuse me, but you’ve been living in a male-dominated society for too long. Maybe if you got off this plantation for a while, you’d realize there is a whole different world out there, one in which women are included. Before I decided to develop a chain of retail stores, I was a business executive, a highly paid problem solver dealing with billion-dollar situations. Wealthy, successful executives paid enormous amounts of money to have me tell them how to run their businesses.”
Cesar raised his eyebrows. “All right, why don’t you enlighten us with your vast business knowledge? How are you going to save the plantation?” His tone was that of addressing a child.
“If you stop interrupting me, I’ll tell you.” I glared at him. “Let’s start out with the fact that you don’t understand the phenomenon—or the arithmetic—of the coffee boom in America. Carlos didn’t, either, because it happened so fast. During the last few years, while you were struggling with the crash in the world price of coffee, coffee boutiques have been opening up everywhere in the States, thousands of them. People have gone from having a simple cup of coffee at breakfast to having designer coffees at any time of the day and night. Words like ‘latte,’ ‘cappuccino,’ and ‘mocha’ that had hardly been used in the last thousand years suddenly are on everyone’s lips.
“And it’s a phenomenon that is spreading around the world—coffee shops are opening up in places like Moscow and Tokyo. They take to designer coffee like they took to American soda pop.”
I looked at Cesar. “When you quoted me the financial end of coffee farming, that it costs nearly a dollar a pound to produce and that you only get ninety cents a pound from wholesalers, you’re talking about selling coffee on the open market. I didn’t buy coffee on the open market, and neither do the better coffee boutiques in America, the ones that survive and grow into national chains.
“I bought specialty coffees because no one is going to come into my store and slap down eight or ten dollars for a pound of coffee they can get for three or four dollars at the supermarket across the street. And the customer isn’t going to pay two or three dollars for a coffee drink that isn’t brewed from premium beans.
“I bought direct from a farm in Costa Rica and I paid three dollars a pound. That’s three times what you’re getting for the plantation’s coffee. It’s a different market than the one you’re selling to. Carlos was an artist at growing coffee, but he didn’t know how to sell it. He was producing specialty beans and selling them as ordinary ones.”
“Is this true?” Juana asked Cesar. “We grow the best coffee in the world. Why can’t we get more for it than other growers?”
“Because she has left out the fact that we would need an office in America and salespeople. And it would take years to build up a reputation, a brand name, that is recognized so these coffee stores she’s talking about will know about us.”
“That’s all true, but not the whole truth,” I said. “A single large retail specialty chain, or a wholesaler supplying specialty coffee stores, could take the entire output of all the acres under cultivation and then some. We only need one sale to one significant retail chain or wholesaler of better coffees. And if we get a signed contract, money can be advanced to keep us in business.”
No one spoke. They sat there and chewed on my words as if they had just been served from the kitchen.
Of course, what I described was a house of cards. In truth, buying lottery tickets and hoping all your dreams will come through with a single scratch would be about as good a business plan for the plantation. The theory was good, but there were two problems: The first was that it would take time and money for me to return to the States with a marketing plan and storm the offices of coffee buyers with samples from the plantation. I might get lucky right away and hit a big sale, but the reality was that it would take months and then years buying up the reputation of the brand. In other words, Cesar was right.
The second problem was that I might get arrested getting off the plane on my first business trip.
I hadn’t lied about one thing: A single chain adopting our coffee as its specialty brand would put the plantation—and my Seattle problems—on easy street. But as I said, so would winning the lottery, which had about the same odds.…
Besides a desperate gamble, I had decided someone wanted me dead. Maybe even everyone at the table, except Juana, would have liked to hasten my demise. I couldn’t be completely sure about Josh, even with my feelings for him. With no place to run to, and no money to get there, I needed a business plan to keep me alive. I wanted to give them a reason to keep me alive. The foreman said the people felt hope about my arrival. Now I wanted to give Cesar hope. Until something else came along that I could use as a life raft.
“Shanghai,” Lily said, breaking the silence.
It was a showstopper. All of us stared at her. She rarely said a word at dinner or any time when she was around us. I didn’t know what she said when she was alone with Cesar, but I suspected it was all body language.
“What about Shanghai?” I asked.
“It’s the biggest city in China, perhaps in the world. You said Tokyo and Moscow are new markets for coffee. Shanghai is bigger than either of them. Sell your coffee in Shanghai.”
“China’s a communist country,” Josh said.
“Communists are no problem; the government has opened Shanghai to the West, just as it did in the past.”
“She’s right,” Cesar said. “It’s a brand-new, untapped market.”
They were both right. I started trembling as pie
ces fell from the sky, falling down all around me. I had an epiphany. A revelation.
The pieces fell together perfectly. Competition would be fierce in the States and Europe, where selling coffee was a well-established business. It would take a long time and fantastic luck to crack a market in which everybody was trying for the same brass ring.
But Shanghai. China. It was only a couple years ago that China was a completely closed nation. Now there was constant news about China opening up this and that for trade.
I recalled business articles I’d read about Shanghai. It had only been open to the West for a couple years. Coffee would be a natural there.
I started trembling. My God, it’s virgin territory. But what if …
I asked Lily, “What if coffee’s already big there?”
“It isn’t. I’m from Shanghai. Everyone drinks tea. Coffee is available, it has always been, but I don’t know of any businesses that sell coffee as their main product, as you describe happening in America.”
“It might take years to get permission—”
She cut me off with a shake of her head. “No, the government is very lenient about business in Shanghai. They want Western business dollars to come there. Besides, my uncle in the city has great influence. He can get permission with a wave of his hand.”
Lily Soong smiled sweetly at me. It was the first time she’d shown any positive emotion in my direction.
“We go to Shanghai, sell your coffee, save the plantation.”
I felt like I was walking on water. For about three seconds.
Something about the smug look Lily and Cesar exchanged caused some of my elation to deflate.
I didn’t like the way Josh refused to meet my eye, and I saw fear on Juana’s face.
None of it was doing anything for my confidence.
And, of course, there had been that “we” part of going to Shanghai. I would have a traveling companion.
I leaned back and let out a little sigh. I needed a miracle and it had appeared. But like I keep saying about a snake in every paradise …
I didn’t have any other choices. I needed virgin territory, and from the sounds of it, Shanghai was waiting to be exploited. And the city itself was big enough to be an enormous market.
In a way, I saw it as another change of planes.
I could jump on a plane to Shanghai and duck the trouble in Colombia.
What’s the worse that could happen if I ran to the Far East?
HONGKONG
Capitalism Gone Gonzo
31
Flying halfway around the world with the China Doll was ego busting. It was hard on a woman’s self-image to walk through an airport terminal and have every man in the place turn and look—at the woman next to her.
I discovered during our time together that besides oozing with sex appeal, Lily Soong had a good mind—but she was deviously clever at keeping it concealed. She pretended with men that she was a sex object and with women that she was more interested in the color of her fingernails than reading a book. I don’t know if she read, but I could almost see the wheels in her head moving as she analyzed situations, all the while pretending to concentrate on her fingernails or to stare blankly past me.
I suspected that men who were drawn into her web by her exotic sexuality soon discovered that she was more of a lioness than a house cat. When they crossed her women would soon discover those fingernails became claws.
We would arrive in Hong Kong before noon and the itinerary she set up had us staying overnight there before catching a flight to Shanghai. That wasn’t surprising; even though a flight was available later that afternoon to Shanghai, we would both be tired after an agonizingly long flight and changing planes. But in my suspicious mind, everything Lily did had an ulterior motive.
“I have an uncle in Hong Kong,” she told me. “It would be rude if I didn’t see him while I was in the city.”
She gave me information about the “New China” during the flight, stepping for a moment out of her China Doll persona and exposing her knowledge of world events.
“The Chinese leadership has had more intelligence than the rest of the communist world. It looked around and saw the failure of a communist economy. The Soviet Union has crumbled because the communist system was so bad, they manufactured products that didn’t work and couldn’t grow enough grains to feed their own people. North Korea is such a failure that we hear stories that people are turning to cannibalism.”
On the other hand, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore were booming.
“That’s why our leaders opened Shanghai to the West. It was once the financial center of the Far East. They opened it up so China would have a door to the Western financial centers.”
I said, “I’ve read that the city is famous not only for having been a financial center, but in the old days it was notorious for its corrupt, depraved lifestyles. Gangsters, dens of iniquity where drugs and sex were sold…”
She shrugged. “Is there anywhere in the world where there are no drugs, prostitution, and crime?”
“True … but most places don’t have them in the abundance that Shanghai has been famous for.” Medellín had the world’s leading drug king in residence, but the Colombian city lacked Shanghai’s reputation for the exotic and kinkier kinds of pleasure.
She kept a blank face, but I saw she was smothering a laugh.
“Is Hong Kong like Shanghai? I mean, I know Hong Kong is famous for its merchandise, but it’s also kind of a Sin City, too, isn’t it?”
“Hong Kong has house cats; Shanghai has jungle cats.” She met my eye, a small, secret smile on her lips. “The Chinese in Hong Kong have been governed by the British. If you do wrong, you go to court. In Shanghai, the government is not so lenient. If you do wrong, sometimes they just shoot you. It makes for criminals who will do anything not to get caught.”
It made sense. The stories coming out of Russia about its “mafiya” left the impression that Russian criminals were much more brutal than organized crime in the States—because when Russian cops gave an “attitude adjustment,” the recipient didn’t always survive.
I said, “I’ve heard that with the British turning Hong Kong over to Red China in a few years, businesspeople are desperate to establish a financial base in other countries, especially in the U.S. and Europe.”
She shrugged and examined her fingernails, signaling that she was getting bored with thinking—or educating me.
I read in the guidebook I’d bought in the airport that some Hong Kong money was also being directed to Shanghai as a place of opportunity as the town turned to a boomtown, Wild West economy. I decided to let her off the hook about Far East economies, but I had one more question.
“What does your uncle do in Hong Kong?” I asked.
“Business.”
“What kind of business?”
“Big business. Like my uncle in Shanghai.”
“Anything that can use our coffee?”
“No.”
Okay. That was all very enlightening. When she wanted to be evasive, Lily was a master at it. But c’est la vie; I didn’t care what Lily did as long as it didn’t affect my plans to break into—or create—a Shanghai coffee market.
Along with my basic carry-on, for a change I had a checked piece of luggage. It contained sealed one-pound bags of roasted beans from the plantation. Rather than grinding the beans ahead of time, to ensure I was able to provide potential distributors with the freshest taste I also brought along a small, hand-cranked grinder, the type used for nuts, and filters. In addition, I threw in three small coffee brewers, the two-cup varieties found in hotel rooms, along with paper filters.
Add hot water, and I was set up to make fresh-brewed coffee on the spot for buyers.
I needed a “famous” brand look for the coffee packages. I took a picture of the plantation and waterfall, with the surrounding lush greenery and plants in colorful bloom. A friend of Juana’s was an artist. The artist turned the picture
into a painting and I had a print shop in Medellín do labels that we stuck on the one-pound bags.
Cesar thought the time and expense of making the packages attractive was a waste, but he knew zero about marketing. However, he took surprisingly well to Lily and me heading to China with a suitcase full of coffee. Which made me suspicious. Raising my paranoia even further was Josh’s attitude. He seemed genuinely worried. Knowing that he was more worried about me going to Shanghai than he had been about me staying in Colombia, where he thought I would be murdered, did make me wonder what might be waiting for me in the biggest city in the most populated country on the planet—where I didn’t speak the language, didn’t know the customs, and could be arrested as a foreign spy for spitting on the sidewalk.
“How did your father end up experimenting in growing a naturally decaf coffee plant?” I asked.
“Would it be strange to you if an American scientist came to Colombia to experiment on coffee plants? Do you only find it strange because my father is a Chinese?”
I found it strange that the man was even her father, but I didn’t volunteer that. “I wouldn’t find it strange for an American scientist because the person would have been raised in a coffee culture. China is a tea culture. Your father drinks tea. I haven’t seen him drink a single cup of coffee at the plantation. I’ve never seen you drink coffee. I was just curious what directed your father toward experimenting with coffee, rather than tea or some other product linked to China.”
She avoided my eyes and looked toward the front of the plane, a sure sign she was thinking up a lie.
“My father’s work is in modifying plants. He doesn’t care if it’s to take the caffeine out of coffee or make bananas glow in the dark.”
Good reply. Evasive and vague because she spoke in nothing but generalities, but it was at least plausible and showed that she was a better liar than me. Perhaps she’d had more practice at it. I just couldn’t place her as the daughter of a scientist—or the niece of a businessman in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Lily was a sensuous woman, with an air of the exotic and the erotic. When it came to older men in her life, the quaint old phrase “Sugar Daddy” came to mind.
The Devil to Pay Page 19