by Dan Pollock
Such deal-sweetening had to be done judiciously, D.W. learned, for Qaboos was known to scrutinize all cabinet-level officials for mysterious enrichments. But D.W. took this as a positive. Such constraints would fall heaviest on the Seven Sisters, he reasoned, with their massive slush funds and their willingness to move those funds into numbered offshore bank accounts. The premium would be instead on the best proposal, put forward with the greatest initiative, persuasion and personal charm. Of course, Sam Warrender was already making the most of these altered rules, forging a bond with the sultan as a fellow horseman.
How was D.W. to compete? Undercapitalized Soderholm was in no position to procure such royal inducements. Even if it were, D.W. had not even been invited to Qaboos’ gleaming new Al-Alam palace overlooking Muscat harbor. D.W.’s highest government connection was a Korean martial artist who taught Tae Kwon Do to the teenage sons of the Minister of Petroleum and Minerals. Still, with nothing to lose, D.W. conceived and executed his modest plan of influence and submitted his bids. Then, like everyone else, he waited.
A week later, to general astonishment, the Sultanate announced that the concessions would be divided among British Petroleum, Proteus—and obscure Soderholm. The lion’s share would, as expected, go to BP, but a potentially lucrative smaller area was assigned to D.W.’s company. Proteus, meanwhile, was only awarded drilling rights for some offshore wildcat wells.
Suddenly the little Texas company with the Scandinavian name and the Asian managing director was on everybody’s lips. Who the hell was this Duk-Won Lee character? And how had he and little Soderholm pulled off their giant-killing coup?
Sam Warrender was the first to catch up to D.W., literally, and pose these questions. It was shortly after dawn, several hours before the official sultanic announcement of drilling awards. D.W. had been jogging along the Corniche road, logging his miles in advance of the day’s heat and the day’s business. As he watched a container ship furrow the glassy surface of Muscat harbor en route to the Arabian Sea, he was overtaken by a tall, loping figure in a hooded blue sweatsuit. The man slowed to jog alongside and threw off his hood, exposing sweat-soaked white hair and a barracuda grin. D.W. immediately recognized the Proteus chairman. They introduced themselves and shook hands.
“So,” Sam managed between lungfuls of air, “you’re the little sonuvabitch... who whipped my ass... and everybody else in town.”
“Ah, then it is official?”
“Yes, it’s official... So how the hell did you do it?”
“The Force was with me, Sam.”
“Force? What force you talking about?”
“The Force that binds the universe.”
“What is that? Zen?”
“No. Obi Won Kenobe. Didn’t you see Star Wars?”
“I don’t go to movies much... not since John Wayne died.”
“Ah, Sam, that was your mistake.”
“Okay, D.W. Now suppose you tell me... what in the name of Allah... a goddamn movie has to do... with getting the Sultan by the short hairs.”
D.W. obliged.
By “chance”—D.W. skipped over the Tae Kwon Do connection—he had discovered that the Omani Minister of Petroleum and Minerals had teenage sons who were fanatic followers of the Star Wars films, especially the martial arts stuff. All D.W. knew about such things was by way of his thirteen-year-old daughter, Jacqueline, who was similarly infected. Telephoning her in San Francisco, he had learned that fans all over the world were anxiously awaiting the final film of the trilogy, Revenge of the Jedi, due out later that year. But Jacqueline boasted that she already had secret information about the movie’s plot, from a schoolfriend whose uncle was an accountant at Lucasfilm, where the movie was being made.
Sam cut in: “Okay. So Farid’s kids are Star Wars junkies. I got that much. So what does that buy you?”
D.W. smiled ruefully. “I agree it is not much. But it was all I had, you see?”
Through his daughter’s schoolfriend, he managed to get his hands on storyboard material on the new film, now retitled Return of the Jedi, along with an invitation to an advance screening in a small-town theater near Skywalker Ranch, Lucasfilm’s Marin County, California, headquarters. D.W. had added first-class air tickets and Nob Hill hotel accommodations in San Francisco.
The oil minister had received the gratuities politely. It was only later, after his hard-to-please sons reportedly went into ecstatic shock, that his gratitude had taken more tangible form.
“I just hope they like the movie,” D.W. concluded his account to Sam.
“I bet you do, you crafty little sonuvabitch!”
D.W. caught the gleam in Sam’s eye and replied in kind, “Ha! Eat my dust, you horse-thieving bastard!”
That night in Sam’s suite the two men got drunk together. They talked of their separate careers and were amazed at a number of peculiar parallels. Both had been in Pusan at the same time during the Korean War in 1952, Sam briefly as an eighteen-year-old PFC with the U.S. Second Infantry Division, Duk-Won as a six-year-old orphan in a Methodist missionary school. During high school and college, both had worked an assortment of odd jobs—Sam as a barbed-wire stringer and roughneck for drilling contractors, and D.W. doing everything from boxing urinals to shucking oysters in a Baltimore cannery. Both got married in college, to the wrong girl, and neither had remarried.
These congruities continued into their professional careers. Both men had served short stints for corporate leviathans—Sam with Standard of New Jersey, D.W. as a field geologist for Royal Dutch Shell—before declaring for entrepreneurial independence. After his divorce at the age of thirty, Sam had gone wildcatting in the Oklahoma and Kansas oil patch, chasing leases and investors, living out of his pickup, washing up in cattle tanks—and running through a half-million in drilling money before bringing in his first producing well. D.W. had jumped ship from Shell in Indonesia in order to prospect for natural gas. After a few hard years, each had abandoned his brave solo attempt for salaried security, this time with lesser, but more venturesome outfits—Proteus and Soderholm respectively.
Before they’d called it a night, each had dealt wallet snapshots onto the coffee table. Sam led with Tony, then a twenty-four-year-old Harvard MBA student, whose blue-blazered pose and languid smile showed a careful adaptation to his Ivy League habitat and a cultivated disdain for all things Oklahoman, which happened to include his father. Sam was far more proud of the plump and lovely Teresa in her pigtails and full Girl Scout regalia. The girl was then fourteen and living with María Elisa in Albuquerque. Sam’s Teresa, it turned out, was only two years older than D.W.’s Jacqueline, who attended an exclusive San Francisco girl’s school and was depicted on horseback, with a blinding smile and a big blue ribbon. In another intriguing para-llel, both girls were lovely hybrids—Mexican-American and Korean-American.
Sam and D.W.’s chat had resumed two days later on a nine-hour flight to London. A month after that, D.W. accepted Sam’s invitation and had flown to the Lazy S for a weekend of skeet and trap-shooting.
“There’s got to be something I’m better at than you,” Sam had observed after D.W. narrowly defeated him on both ranges. “But I’m kind of leery of trying you at poker.”
“A wise decision. Of all my college jobs, playing poker paid the best.”
At least D.W. wasn’t much of a horseman, but gritted his teeth and hung on gamely as they rode out on a Sunday morning to look over some of the Lazy S’s twenty-two thousand acres of rangeland. On the way back, Sam had casually asked the younger man if he’d like a job.
“Only yours,” D.W. had replied.
“That may not be out of the question. They keep after me to find a successor.”
“Be careful, Sam,” D.W. had said. “I might say yes.”
And he had. Eleven years ago that had been. D.W. had started as general manager of Far Eastern operations, putting together joint ventures with Korean companies in steel-making, aluminum smelting, even shipbuilding. Five years later Sam
brought him back to New Orleans as a divisional vice president. Three years after that D.W. became Sam’s designated understudy as corporate president. As long as two years ago, it became apparent—to everybody but Sam and some of his old friends on the board—that Duk-Won Lee was running Proteus Industries. It was now past time for Sam to saddle up and ride into the sunset...
*
D.W. stood behind his desk at the rosewood sideboard and splashed Suntory into three shotglasses. He handed one to Owen Meade and one to Ray Arrillaga. Then he held his drink aloft and drew their glances to him.
“To Samuel,” he said, and gulped.
Chapter Fifteen
For the past three days Félix Rosales had felt himself caught up in a real-life telenovela—just like Lágrimas de Amor, “Tears of Love,” or perhaps Mujer Prohibida, “Forbidden Woman.” He was the handsome young guy who comes to Caracas from the farm or the ranchito, lucks into a job as, say, a limo driver, then glances into his rear-view mirror at a dazzling, high-fashion blonde. Instantly, her eyes are drawn to his in the mirror. Their pupils dilate, their eyebrows tremble. Her star-lashed gaze moves down, taking in the thick, curly hair under his little cap, his powerful jaw, his broad, uniformed shoulders. Their colliding passions are underscored by a guitar, or maybe an arpa llanero, the harp of the Venezuelan plains. It is only a matter of episodes before the two wind up on satin sheets in a high-rise penthouse, or maybe in one of those walled estates in Altamira or the Country Club district—or, better yet, in some Margarita Island beach hotel with palm trees waving out the window.
Jacqueline Lee wasn’t a blonde, of course, but she was rich and beautiful, and their first glance had been muy tórrido. Félix saw it impact on Jacqueline the same way. He was definitely not imagining this. He had experienced many such combustible events.
As far back as he could remember, he had been fussed over by the ladies of the family and the barrio. Then, as boyish charm grew into machismo, he took serious stock of his powers, making a study of what things worked best so he could be most devastatingly himself.
But women were the best teachers of all. And Félix had never experienced a shortage of willing tutors or practice partners. The street girls of the Propatria barrio in the Caracas hills had not waited for his puberty to initiate him in the arts and mechanics of love. The tutelage continued during his adolescent years, especially at the hands of a plump, norteamericana housewife to whom Félix had bicycled groceries. Each new teenage job brought forth a fresh cadre of instructors, more than the young man could possibly satisfy—though he had tried his best. In retrospect, their faces and names and bodies blurred; they were collectively the sweating, giggling chicas of the factories and shops and restaurants. And during his non-working hours, the shops and cafés of the Sabana Grande and the discos of El Rosal and La Mercedes seemed always filled with lovely caraqueñas.
By the time he found himself—quite unexpectedly—at the university, Félix had learned to be somewhat selective. True, he could not now recall all the coeds and lady professors and faculty wives on whom he had honed his amorous skills. Yet there had been many he had passed over. And the older he got, the pickier he had become.
On the same day he’d met Jacqueline, for instance, there had been the overripe blonde from Ciudad Bolívar TV, Señorita Estévez, who looked estupenda—at a distance. She had gone so far as to rub her big chichis against Félix’ biceps while pressing her business card into his palm. The card was now somewhere in his backpack—if he ever got truly desperate. Two of the female grad students who’d arrived at the dig yesterday had also clearly signaled their availability (and the two who had not were obviously lesbias). But in Félix’ immediate habitat, only one female interested him now.
Jacqueline Lee.
She could have stepped out of a telenovela, like the girl in the limo mirror. She was smart and sassy, one of those leggy creatures with flawless smiles who are either born to money or marry it deliciously young and exist therefore in an essentially different world from the rest of humanity. They travel in yachts and limos and behind first-class curtains. They sleep late and dance all night. At least, Jacqueline Lee represented all these unattainable things to Félix. And yet here she was, suddenly in his world, hiking through the mud on Cerro Calvario, diving into Canaima Lagoon, eager for adventure. Almost her first words to him—spoken thrillingly into his ear in the equipment tent while they waited out the deluge—were: “Call me Jake.”
And there had been that unforgettable moment yesterday in the plane when she’d squeezed beside him to see Angel Falls out his window. As she pushed closer to the plexiglass, her long hair brushed his cheek—then completely curtained his view of the great waterfall. But Félix hadn’t minded. Her proximity intoxicated, and mingled fragrances hinted at erotic intimacies. He had grown quickly excited. Then, as the plane circled and Jake twisted to return to her seat, hadn’t her elbow brushed his lap? And her eyes, hadn’t they flashed private mischief?
The rest of the day Félix had had only filtered appreciation of the unfolding grandeur of the Sabana, so galvanized was he by Jacqueline Lee. At Canaima, while Sam napped on the beach, they splashed together in the lagoon, and Félix had lifted her out of the water, a dripping prize. And she was an armful, though Félix pretended she was all but weightless. She fought back, squealing, slapping at his chest, flailing her long legs. But even in play, their eyes had exchanged a serious awareness of each other—exactly like the dueling glances in the limousine mirror.
Though there had been no more provocative incidents that afternoon, the subtle awareness continued between them. Then had come her announcement that she was going back to Cerro Calvario to start a documentary film—in defiance of her father and Sam Warrender. Félix, too, had been stunned at first, though he quickly suspected himself of being a factor in her decision. Then, while driving her back to the mountain, he had felt like a returning conqueror.
He had imagined how it would be, with Jacqueline Lee in camp. She would film him working the pits, bare-chested, sweating on behalf of science. And he would keep his eye on her, ready to intercede in her behalf. And here, in the belly of Venezuela, he would have no rivals—only Arqui and his usual flock of nerdy volunteers. Félix could reel her in at his own sweet pace.
Their initial consummation might occur inside his tent, or perhaps under a star-smeared savanna sky. But ultimately, whether Jacqueline completed her documentary or simply wearied of camp squalor, he saw them making love in luxury, surrounded by all the glamorous telenovela trappings. He saw himself climbing out of a Ferrari Testarossa and lounging about in baggy Italian silk suits like those Miami Vice dudes. In such reveries, Jacqueline was the perfect ornamental adjunct.
But once at the excavation, nothing had gone according to his plan. Last evening, and again most of this day, Arquimedeo had kept Félix on the run, straw-bossing the volunteers in countless tasks, from unloading supplies to pitching tents and digging drainage ditches. Whenever Félix had glimpsed Jacqueline, she seemed to be in convoy—often attended by Arquimedeo himself, who was embarrassingly flattered by her documentary intentions and eager to facilitate the filming. Félix had managed only an occasional wave in Jacqueline’s direction.
And worse was to come.
A few minutes earlier, after digging half a latrine himself, and with his pecs pumped and his lats spread, he had gone stalking the camp for her, determined to rekindle the spark between them. From an overlook, he’d spotted her down by the car park, hurrying toward the access road. Mercifully she was alone. Félix had yelled “Jake!” But when she had spotted him, she merely waved, shouted something unintelligible—and continued on.
Félix moved laterally along the ridge, straining to follow her receding figure. Where the hell was she going in such a hurry? Then, beyond her, he saw a man approaching on horseback, trailing a spare mount. The horseman lifted his hat and made a flourish. Even from distance, Félix recognized the gesture—and Sam Warrender’s shock of white hair. Momen
ts later, with what seemed practiced ease, Jacqueline swung herself into the empty saddle and wheeled her horse in tandem with Sam’s, heading back down the trail. Félix watched them vanish behind an edge of rock.
He stood there, unable to move away—until someone pinched the bulge of his left triceps muscle. Then he swung around so swiftly that his elbow nearly clubbed the young woman who had stolen up behind him.
It was Marta Mendes, a short and not very pretty girl of Portuguese parents from Cumaná in Sucre State. She had already proved herself a tireless worker and persistent nuisance, dogging Félix’s footsteps and doting on him with spaniel eyes. They were brimming up at him even now, enormous in her narrow face with its unfortunate, acne-pitted cheeks. The rest of her was impressive, Félix thought, had Marta only been a man—broad shoulders, a hard, flat chest, knotty arms, small hips and muscle-grooved legs. She’d bragged to Félix that she’d outworked her brothers hauling nets on the family’s fishing boats in the Gulf of Cariaco. Not exactly what Félix was looking for in a female. But he, apparently, was quite close to her ideal of manhood.
“Hey, I didn’t mean to scare you, Félix,” she apologized. “You were going to show me some of your workout routines, remember?”
“Marta, believe me, with all the shitwork up here, the last thing you’re going to need is extra exercise.”
“You pump iron, you said so.”
“Yeah, but I’m a freak.”
“That’s what I like about you.” She paused. “So, were you watching Jacquie just now?”
“I wondered where she was going is all.”
“Why?”