by Noel Hynd
“How do you feel about some travel?” he asked.
“To where?”
“South America. A trouble spot.”
The waitress arrived with the fruit and the rolls. Alex appreciated the breather. Mini-Danishes and mini-croissants. Collins offered the plate to Alex before taking anything himself.
A noisy group of women, tourists, moved into a nearby table. One of them noticed Collins and nudged her acquaintances, a celebrity sighting in Manhattan.
“I know it’s only been a few months since Kiev,” he said. “That can seem like a short time or a long time. Do you think you’re ready for something new?”
“I’m ready to listen,” Alex said.
“Then I’m ready to make you an interesting offer,” he answered. “Have you ever been to Venezuela?”
“A couple of times. When I was with the Treasury Department.”
“Caracas?”
“That and Maracaibo.”
Collins drew a breath and began. “I need someone to fly down to Venezuela and troubleshoot a problem for me. Someone who’s good with people, speaks the language fluently, has good instincts for trouble, and most of all someone I can trust.”
“I’m flattered.”
“First class airfare, the proper support and security when you get there. Just meet some people, assess what’s going on, come back, and report to me.”
“Sounds easy,” she said. “It couldn’t possibly be.”
“You’re right. It won’t be. I’d guess it would take you maybe a month to properly complete the assignment. I’d pay you twenty thousand dollars for the month, plus expenses. You’d need to go almost immediately. Sorry about the weather conditions this time of year. It’s brutally hot.” He smiled. “You’re going to think you died and went to the wrong place. How’s that sound? Miserable?”
“I’m still listening,” she said.
“For almost five years, I’ve been financing a group of Christian missionaries who have been living among a large tribe of primitive indigenous people,” Collin explained. “They’re in a village named Barranco Lajoya. It’s a very remote area south of the Orinoco River in the Guayana region. Very rugged area in the southeastern quadrant of the country, not far north of the border with Brazil. Not that there are signs posted in the jungle. Most of the region doesn’t even have accurate maps yet.”
“What are they doing, the missionaries?” she asked.
“They import medical care and are also trying to bring electricity to the area. They also support the local churches. Methodists, Episcopalians, and a cross section of evangelicals. Americans mostly, some Canadians, several others. Our people have also learned the indigenous language. It’s mostly an Indian dialect, but with a lot of corrupted Spanish. They’re translating the Bible into the indigenous language. That way they can bring the good news to the people. If they want it.”
“Commendable,” she said.
“I like to think so,” he said. “My gift, if they choose to accept it. Look, it’s not even that big an operation. The costs on the ground are quite minimal. I think my whole budget on this is maybe two hundred thousand dollars a year. Maybe two twenty-five. Small stuff.”
“For you, maybe.”
“Granted, for me. I’ve been blessed in my life, so I try to pass it along while I’m still on this earth. And this is also a pet project, you understand, translating the Bible into a new tongue. I’m convinced it’s helping the people who are there, and the missionaries like what they’re doing. I’d like to keep things going in the right direction.”
“So what’s the problem?” Alex asked.
“Well, after some considerable early success, we’re being sabotaged. A lot of our work gets undone. There seems to be an effort coming from somewhere to discourage our people and drive the missionaries out of the country.”
“That’s unusual, isn’t it?”
“Very. Most countries in Central and South America encourage missionaries even if they don’t like them. They bring dollars and provide social services the governments are unwilling or unable to provide.”
“ ‘An effort coming from somewhere,’ ” Alex repeated, thinking back a beat, framing Collins’ own words. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. Caracas. Washington. Maybe Havana.” He paused. “There are a few ragtag guerrilla organizations in the area, but the army keeps them in check.”
She sipped her coffee. “So interference with missionaries doesn’t make sense.”
“It’s South America. It’s Venezuela. It doesn’t have to.”
Collins produced a sealed manila envelope and handed it to her.
“Obviously, your ultimate job is to report back to me on where the problems are coming from. And what we can do about it, if anything.”
She nodded.
“The Venezuelan government is hostile to us right now, as you know, I’m sure. And the country is almost as lawless as Colombia, next door.”
She nodded. “I’ll take your file with me today,” she said. “Whatever is in it, I want to give it some thought.”
“Fair enough,” he said. He paused, then added, “I should mention one or two more things. Right up front.”
She waited. From the nearby table, the tourists had stopped staring. They turned their attention to the menus.
“I sent someone down there seven weeks ago,” Collins said. “A security man named Diego. Former marine. A very good man. Someone set him up with a mobile phone that was rigged as a bomb. In a hotel bar in Caracas. When he used the phone the first time, he was-how did they say it locally?- decapitado. ”
A pause. “So someone’s playing for keeps.”
“Someone doesn’t want us there, for whatever reason. And I fear that some of my missionaries and their villages are coming into the line of fire, too.” He paused. “You’ll need to wear a gun for protection. God forbid that you ever have to use it. But as I said, it’s a rough area. Jungle cats. Poisonous bats. A lot of snakes.”
“As well as the two-legged dangers,” she said. “Correct?”
“I want to be right up front about what you might be getting into.”
“Then I’ll be up front with you,” she said. “You’re asking me to do something for you and for the church. I’m appreciative of that. But
…” She paused. “You’re talking to a woman whose faith… is badly shaken right now. I’m still recovering from Kiev and asking a whole lot of questions about how God could let something like this happen to me.”
“I know that, Alex. But I also know what you’re like. You need to plunge right back into something.” A shadow passed over his face. “Do you know what Gandhi, a Hindu, said to some British army officers during the battle for Indian independence?”
“What?” she asked.
“He said, ‘Jesus was a good and moral man. The trouble with many of you Christians is that you’re nothing like him.’ That’s why I keep the missions going, feeding the hungry, supplying medical care, doing what I can to fight poverty and illiteracy. I asked myself what Jesus would have done if he’d made all this money in hotels and restaurants.”
She laughed.
“And that was the answer that came to me. So these missions will continue while I’m alive and afterward. I hope you can help.”
“I’ll do my reading tonight, Mr. Collins,” she said.
She reached to her neck, where the gold cross used to be. Nervous tic time again. The jewelry was missing, of course, except in her memory.
“If you’re willing to go forward after you read the file,” he said, “I’m going to put you in touch with a man I’ve recently hired to advise me on some Latin American issues. His name is Sam Deal. Ever heard the name?”
“I might have. It rings a bell.”
“Sam used to work for Washington. I’ve known him for many years. He’s no one’s fool. He can give you an objective picture of what you’re getting into.”
Alex nodded. Somewhere she had heard Deal�
��s name. Then she pegged it. Her friend Laura who worked at the White House had had issues with him.
“I’ve tentatively arranged for you to meet with Sam tomorrow morning at eleven if you wish to proceed. He’s in town for a few days. He has time to meet.”
Alex nodded again.
“Sam would also be your weapons guy when you get to Caracas. You won’t be able to fly with a gun, obviously, but I’ll make sure you have protection as soon as you get there. Sam won’t be in Caracas, but one of his people will arrange things. Don’t worry about clothing for going out in the jungle. What size do you take?”
“Ten, American.”
“I’ll arrange for some gear. Shoes?”
“Nine. Wardrobe and firearms. You think of everything.”
He laughed.
“If you don’t mind my saying so, Mr. Collins,” she said, “you can be a bit of a contradiction.”
“How’s that?”
“You want to send me on a mission of peace, but the first thing you do is supply armament.”
“It’s a cruel, mean world,” he said. “I want you to be safe.”
She smiled. “Sounds like you think I’m going.”
“I rather have my hopes up,” he said.
She grinned slightly and pushed back from the table. If nothing else, the offer was both flattering and exciting. But she wasn’t sure how much flattery or excitement she was in the mood for these days.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll look at everything. Then I’ll call you tomorrow.”
From Collins’s lips, she saw the trace of a grin.
“Thank you, Alex,” he said.
By the entrance to the terrace, there was a sudden commotion that grabbed her attention. Outside on the sidewalk, a noisy homeless man accosted an older couple passing by. Alex watched as the man aggressively pursued them. The older couple hurried their pace. Alex rose to her feet. If no one else would do anything about it, she would.
Collins placed a gentle hand on her wrist. “Don’t trouble yourself,” he said.
“But-?”
Collins then nodded to his bodyguard. The bodyguard, obviously seeking any small piece of action he could find, moved with the grace and speed of a much younger man. He interposed himself between the couple and their assailant.
The panhandler attempted to shove the bodyguard in return. Bad idea. Mr. Collins’s hired hand sent the vagrant hurtling in a different direction, and he disappeared.
FIFTY-SIX
A lex’s apartment on East Twenty-first Street in Manhattan was a very quiet unimposing place, considering its location, and perfectly suited to her needs.
It was nestled into the back of a walk-up building first constructed in 1900, third floor rear, just twenty yards east of Second Avenue. The block itself was quiet, although traffic rumbled southbound on the avenue all day and all night.
Inside the furnished one-bedroom apartment, all windows overlooked a rear courtyard. The two rooms were a witch’s brew of clashing wallpapers, lamp shades, aging furniture, and worn carpets. It reflected the lifestyle of Joseph Collins’s son, Daniel, whose interests were far from the worldly or the run-of-the mill.
The younger Collins, single and about forty, had grown up wealthy, had worked in his father’s businesses for many years, but had also gone to seminary at Southern Methodist. Alex had never met him but had spoken to him on the phone from time to time. At age thirty-five he had left his father’s industries to help administer his father’s Christian philanthropies. There were a collection of pictures on the walls and on tables of Daniel trotting the globe; in Africa, in central America, in South America, in New Mexico, and one-presumably to get a nasty dose of some colder climates-in Labrador.
The pictures showed the young man-these days forty was considered young-in various villages or cities. He looked content with his mission and his missions. Everyone should be so lucky.
Alex quickly took a measure of the other people in the building. The upstairs neighbor was an actor who was out of town, and the downstairs neighbor was the landlord, “Lady Dora” Rose, as she called herself.
“Lady Dora” was a quintessential New Yorker, an elf of a woman in her late sixties. She had been left a pair of brownstones including this one. But the story, as Alex heard it on arrival, got even better.
Lady Dora’s late husband, Marvin, had owned a newsstand that had specialized in thoroughbred and harness racing tout sheets and sporting publications. His store also featured a telephone that never stopped ringing. Marvin, who was fifteen years older than Dora when they wed, had gone out for a walk one night in June 1977 and never came back. Presumably he was still walking.
The “Rose” in Lady Dora’s name was a truncation of “Rosenberg,” which had been Marvin’s name, and the “Lady” was a figment of her own inflated sense of grandeur.
“I made it up so I could be an interesting person,” she told Alex when Alex asked about it. “Then for ninety-four dollars I had had it legally added to my name.”
Lady Dora showed Alex a New York State driver’s license to prove it. Not that she drove or owned a car. Over the years, Lady Rose had also acquired a hint of a British accent, though more often than not the Brooklyn one she had been born with also surfaced. Lady Dora also introduced Alex to Sajit, the handyman, who came in for ten hours a week off the books to sweep the floors, fix the plumbing, and replace lightbulbs.
Sajit was from Sri Lanka. He was a slim, tiny, fastidiously neat man who always wore a white dress shirt with shiny black pants. Today was no exception. Under Lady Rose’s critical eye, he set up a rickety card table with a pair of heavily dented metal folding chairs, the type often seen as props at wrestling matches.
“You will take good care of everything in Daniel’s place, won’t you?” Lady Rose asked. “Daniel’s a wonderful young man. He has a famous father, you know.”
“Daniel’s father arranged with you to let me in,” Alex said.“ Remember?”
“Yes. Of course.” Lady Dora shook her head. It was four in the afternoon the day that Alex had met with Joseph Collins at the Stanhope. The landlady was barefoot in the front vestibule and wore a pink bathrobe, her gray hair in bobby pins. She was on one of her daily rants. This one ended when she spotted the resident of 3-C, a self-proclaimed “documentary film maker” whose work was sold only over the Internet. Alex had a hunch that the man’s oeuvre might be unsuitable for family viewing.
He was in trouble with Lady Dora for something, so Alex headed upstairs with the file in her hand and closed her door on the argument that ensued. It was at this moment that she made a note to phone Ben later that evening, just to vent. Calls between them were becoming more frequent. Alex appreciated the friendship more with each passing week.
That evening, Alex settled into this cozy atmosphere on East Twenty-first Street. She spread out some yogurt and fruit on the small dining table, turned it into her evening meal, and then repaired to the sofa in the living room to read.
Alex embarked upon her reading at a few minutes past eight in the evening.
For years, as the file explained in detail, Collins had been quietly financing the missionaries at a village named Barranco Lajoya in a mountainous region of southeastern Venezuela. The missionaries rotated in and out. There were several teams of them who worked in shifts ranging from six months to two years.
They had been living among a large tribe of primitive indigenous people, learning their language so that they could translate the Bible into it and bring the Christian faith to them. Some of the missionaries doing this work lived with the Indians for at least a year or two in order to learn the language and create an alphabet for it, and then translate the Bible. Some of them brought their families. Their children grew up in these remote villages. There had been considerable early success, first bringing literacy itself to these people, then bringing the Christian faith. And yet, after considerable early success, there then appeared to be an effort to destroy the missionaries’ work and for
ce them to leave the country.
A school built by the missionaries and the villagers had caught fire one night. Livestock had disappeared. The local streams, tributaries of the Rio Xycapo, had been polluted by industrial waste from a higher elevation. Yet there was no industry at higher elevations, and no known settlements. That meant that the waste had been brought in and dumped.
But why? The villagers had nothing that anyone would want. They were simple people who had been self-sufficient for centuries. Why should anything change now? The people were so remote that who could care enough about them to victimize them?
Perhaps, conjectured the writer of this document, the interest of outsiders was enough by itself to put the small tribe on someone’s list of enemies.
Alex began making notes in the margins, observations and questions to ask Mr. Collins when she reported back to him. She started to feel a pull toward these people. It was as if this was the path now intended for her. This mission to Venezuela emerged as something different than anything she had ever done in her life, exactly the type of thing she wanted to do. Against what she had expected, she was interested. An open mind could be dangerous.
She skipped ahead to a photo section. She scanned through several dozen photos of the village of Barranco Lajoya and its people; smiling faces of barefoot children, a classroom bringing literacy, a medical clinic set up, a joint Episcopal-Methodist-Baptist service in a small church. Kids playing soccer.
There were before-and-after shots of people who had received care from Collins’s medical people. She was impressed. The man was doing good in corners of the world that badly needed benefactors. In return, he asked for nothing.
She waded through a background section on their village culture, then ran smack into an assessment of current-day Venezuela and its government.
The government of Venezuela was headed by President Hugo Chavez. His fanatically anti-American policies didn’t make life any easier for Collins or his missionaries. Collins had had the foresight to send Christian workers with supposedly neutral passports-there were three Canadians, two Hondurans, and one English nurse there at the time that Alex read the dossier-all of whom spoke good-to-native-speaker Spanish. But the activities of foreigners in a village in the jungle aroused the ire and suspicion of paranoid rulers in Caracas.