“Do you know what they told me?” Martinez went on, growing indignant. “Do you know what—I am ashamed to be a Tico and telling you this, but one of the officers in the development company took me to dinner at one of the fanciest restaurants in San Jose last year—alone, without my wife or daughters—and he revealed to me what they are planning for this hotel. Their big secret, which he let me in on thinking that it might convince me that their millions of colones would make my life better.”
“What?” Lucy asked. “What did they offer you?”
“They revealed to me that this hotel is going to be a special sex hotel. You know that prostitution is legal in Costa Rica, yes?”
“I couldn’t help but notice in San Jose,” Lucy said.
“Of course you couldn’t. And it has never really been anything I thought or cared about particularly. We are a tolerant people, we Ticos, and so it was always, for me, live and let live. But then they tell me that this hotel will specialize in sex—that the guests will be able to order in advance what kind of sex they want, and with what kind of person, be it man or woman, boy or girl, one or two or three people, whatever they want and can pay for. And my special prize was that they would allow me to come for a few days each year to do whatever I wanted—that way—for as long as I wanted to. That was in addition to all the money. I threw my food in his face and walked out,” he said. “To think he would talk to me, a happily married man, that way, as if we are all as corrupt and immoral as he and his stupid partners in that company.”
“What was the name of the tourism person again? The one who shut you down?”
“Lorenzo Vargas,” he replied. “He’s one of about one thousand deputy directors at the National Bureau of Tourism. They’ve always made life miserable for hotelkeepers here, that’s their job, but now they’re out to get me, or at least he is.” They stopped back by the swimming pool. “And I don’t quite know what to do about it at this point.” He sighed. “There’s no money coming in, my mother-in-law is sick, my kids need to go to school, and that horrible golf resort is going to be built over there even if I don’t sell out. Sometimes it seems like I don’t have any way out of this mess, Señorita Lucy. But I’m sorry, you don’t need to hear all of this.”
“No, no, I’m really interested,” she said. “I’m just sorry I can’t do anything about it. Really.” Although she had seen the initials LV with phone numbers and dollar amounts on her document photos.
“I think that whatever they do about the sex, they will build a really large, estupido hotel here, and this beach will be ruined forever. So I have wanted to not sell simply to keep them away from the beach.”
“You’re right. They will mess it up. There’s no doubt about it. But I’m trying to figure out some things about the people that own this hotel company, and maybe I can help you out. I will stay in touch, OK?” They wandered back by Lucy’s car.
“Sure, Lucy Ripken. Hey, you want to stay over? The rooms are all set up.”
“No, but thank you, Lester. I’ve got too much to do. Along with all the business about the Four Señors I’m writing a guidebook to all of Costa Rica. Would you mind if I told your story, about why you are closed?”
“No, please do. Maybe it will—if many tourists ask for my place perhaps they will change their minds.” His face darkened. “But I think this is very unpossible.”
“I’ll write it up anyway. That’s the least I can do.” They exchanged cards. “I’ll call you when I have some news, OK?”
“Sure. Gracias, Lucy. Ciao.” He waved in her rear view mirror as she meandered slowly down the road, headed back to La Cruz.
CHAPTER NINE
THE SHADOW OF ARENAL
An hour or so later Lucy pulled off the Panamerican Highway southbound into the dusty parking lot of a Liberia steakhouse. Guanacaste was cattle country, much deforested to make room for ranches supplying cheap beef for the billions of burgers sold, and so the local eateries specialized in steak. The dark, cool restaurant offered a welcome break from the harsh light of mid-day on the dry, dusty plain. The noon temperature stood at 98 degrees, with a hot wind blowing down from the smoldering volcanoes of the Guanacaste range to the east.
By the time her slab of beef arrived she was into her second beer and had cross-referenced all the Liberian listings in her guidebook against the local phone book. Everything checked out, and she even decided to add to the guidebook the one internet café she found in the phone book. After eating she doled out eight dollars worth of colones and woozily emerged into the blistering early afternoon heat, climbed into her car, and crawled towards downtown Liberia, a short drive east of the highway.
A colorful assemblage of one and two story buildings encircled a shady plaza in the city center. She found the internet café, parked, and went in. She ordered iced coffee from a bored teenage girl with spiky bleached hair, a pierced lip, and a hummingbird tattooed on her neck, then sat down and got online to google The Four Señors.
What came up first was a generically appealing investment company website, with bland, polished paragraphs in four languages, and lots of pretty pictures. Nothing she didn’t already know. The Off The Book projects were also off the site. She thought she knew now why the hotel was off the books, but why the orphanage and the fishing camp?
The related sites that Google delivered were business stories from Latin American and U.S. newspapers about the firm. No scandal, no smoking guns, no evil juju.
Next she googled Rancho de la Luna. Several listings came up, led off by a recording studio in the California desert and a waterfront hotel in Cienfuegos, Cuba. And the orphanage: the website’s home page included introductory text and a color photo of a lovely spread with several well-maintained residential and farm buildings, nicely situated on cleared, tended farmland acres along the banks of a pretty, greenwater river. She scrolled down to view portraits of assorted merry-looking children, single and in groups. The text described an idyllic institution devoted to the well-being of children from not only Costa Rica but all of Central America. The kids in the photos looked well-fed, happy and healthy. In a section called About Us, Lucy found a link to a New Jersey-based organization called Adopting from the Americas, or AFTA. She had a look.
AFTA offered adoption counseling and services, specializing in children from Costa Rica. The website featured photos of smiling Hispanic kids with smiling North American parents, testimonials from assorted satisfied clientele, and services ranging from home study counseling to legal referrals to assistance in locating children in Costa Rica. Lucy looked it all over, couldn’t see anything to hang her hat on, and was just getting ready to backtrack and google AFTA when the computer screen went black. Crash. “Shit,” she said, looking up for the girl who ran the shop. The girl was nowhere to be seen, in fact the café was utterly deserted but for Lucy. All four computers had gone down. The lights had stayed on, so the problem was in the server, not the power source.
Lucy got up and checked around, saw no one, then stepped outside into major, brain-blistering heat. There was nothing to be done. She went in and threw a couple of dollars on the counter, tried her cell which didn’t work, and found a pay phone.
She called Harold in New York. His voicemail answered. “Ipswich here. Leave word. Thanks.”
“Hey Harry what’s up? It’s me. Where are you? Listen, I need a favor. Has to do with those money guys I told you about, the Four Señors. Can you do a little research for me, see if you can find anything stinky on an operation called Adoption from the Americas? That’s A-F-T-A. I think they’ll be based in Jersey. I’ll call you tomorrow evening between six and eight my time. See ya.”
Lucy zipped down to Canas on the InterAmerican, then turned east towards Tilaran and Lake Arenal. Soon the swoopy little road rose into grassy green hills; the grass gave way to patchy farm and forestland, with rows of energy-producing windmills atop the ridges. She took a guidebook look around Tilaran, a quiet, whitewashed town scarcely affected by the tourist trade, then m
ade the short drive to the lake.
Except for a single cloud hiding the peak of the perfect volcanic cone at the far end of the long, hill-ringed lake, the sky loomed clear, a sharp, crystalline blue. Warm, gusty wind surged from the volcano to where she stood, on a bluff overlooking the lake’s northwest end. She watched three windsurfers racing across the whitecapped water, and spotted a grassy put-in littered with sails and boards below her. To her left, a long, low hotel tucked into a green hillside—the Knossos, named and designed after a Cretan palace—gleamed in the sun. A group of European windsurfers had opened the hotel a few years back in the windsurfing boom. Now the sport had faded, and the hotel with it. But it looked well-tended at the moment, and sight of those sails flying over the wind-ripped lake recalled for her the thrill to be had in high speed board-sailing.
She broke out her binoculars and had a look towards the volcano, its concave crater-top peeking out intermittently from behind the cloud-cover. At that moment, a sharp, earth-rattling rumble served to remind: I am Arenal, and I am very powerful. A sulfurous tinge to the surrounding cloud enhanced the effect. She could see a faint red glow on the cone’s northern side, evidence of active lava flow. People had died up there of late; rumor had it flying saucers dove into and rose out of the lake at certain secret times: aliens come to fuel up on the gas generated by the volcano, accessed through vents hidden deep in the lake. There were photos, eyewitness testimonials, the occasional missing villager returning years later, blissed-out after a joy ride through the galaxy. It was all documented. And the Four Señors ran a tax-deductible charity organization.
Lucy brought her mind back to the matters at hand, en route to the blindingly white Palace at Knossos. An hour later, after checking in and yakking with the handsome lanky Frenchman who ran the hotel—Lucy was one of just four guests registered for the night—she found her way down to the put-in. The wind blew 20 to 25 knots, somewhat erratic and gusty, with choppy swells bouncing back and forth across the narrow sailing zone. Lucy chose a four point five meter sail and a floaty, eight foot six inch board, did a beach launch, and rode the wind.
Twenty minutes into her hour on the water the volcano blew away its cloud cover and emerged, a stark, startling vision towering over the end of the lake, with streaks of boiling red lava distinctly visible around the cone at top. It was a magnificent yet malevolent sight. When she came in, one of the windsurf gear guys pointed out a glimmery sparkle near the top—wreckage from the plane crash she’d read about.
The next morning after another hour in the wind, muscles sore from the night before, Lucy packed it in and took off on the winding, oft-washed-out road that followed the north shore of the lake on a southeasterly tack.
Half an hour into this drive Lucy decided, or rather sensed, that she was being followed. There was this little green SUV that she spotted behind her as she slowed and glanced back across a sweeping bend in the road, hoping for a long view of the Knossos across the lake. A few miles on she noticed it again, and would not have thought twice about it except that she held somewhere in her memory the image of the same car parked across the town square in Tilaran. Since she currently drove on the only road from west to east in this part of the country, this probably meant nothing. But now as she contemplated this same green SUV as it waited, six cars behind her, at a washout that had cut the road to one lane, she realized that this very car—or one exactly like it—had been one of about a dozen cars parked in a dirt parking area at the hotel construction site on the beach below La Cruz. The same car or not, by coincidence or design, justifiable paranoia or what? And what about those crashed computers in Liberia? She didn’t dare stare at the driver. He stood impatiently at the side of his car, watching her. Or admiring the view. She couldn’t be sure.
At last they moved on. Lucy kept one eye on the rearview and the other on the looming volcano. After while, between the bends in the road and the trucks roaring past, she lost track of the green SUV. She paused by the dam for a good long look at Arenal, a towering, overpowering presence, rumbling and roaring above a bank of sulfurous clouds wrapped around its midsection.
Soon she reached Tabacon, home to one of the country’s fancier resorts. Lucy had opted not to stay there for two reasons: one, they had rather brusquely declined to comp her; and two, according to Manny Sky, the Tabacon was located squarely in the path of a major lava flow, should Arenal choose to blow in that direction—not an unlikely prospect at all, Manny had proclaimed, shaking his head at the appalling, greed-driven stupidity of his competition. Instead he’d advised her to check out the day-use thermal pools down the road. She stopped and had a look. Mobbed with vacationing Ticos and their families, the place was absolutely delightful. Lucy got into her suit and into a steamy hot pool.
Ten minutes into a lovely soak she happened to glance up at the volcano—and the volcano roared. Lucy nearly flew from the water as the ground shook and her ears rattled, so loud was the sound—and so very, very close was the volcano. God, she could not believe these people weren’t running for their cars in a panic. Instead one and all continued to laugh and play. The volcano rumbled and roared and hissed, and not a soul paid attention.
Excepting Lucy, who flew out of the water, dressed and headed back to her car, determined to add words of volcano warning to the guidebook, even if the editors, under pressure from the hoteliers—or the possible criminals at the tourist board—later removed them, citing the exigencies of available space.
Parked across the road from her rental car she spotted the green SUV. Or one much like it. Why hadn’t she noted the plate number before? Idiot girl! She went to the railing that edged the lot and looked down over the scene she’d just left. Her bad guy was nowhere in sight. She sighed. What was up here? Why would anyone be following her, anyway? The only person she’d crossed was Machado of the Four Señors, and as far as he knew she was nothing more than a self-righteous gringa who disapproved of the way he did business.
Lucy got back in her car, whipped out onto the road, and headed towards Fortuna, watching the road ahead and the road behind, hawk-eyed and ready for action. There was nothing going on and no one in the mirror but six families in six cars following her down the road. And look! A green SUV, seven cars back.
Lucy cruised into Fortuna, found the central plaza, and parked. She strolled over to the funky two-story wooden warehouse building, just off the square, that housed the offices and operations of Desafio, or the challenge, a rafting and adventure company run by a California East Indian named Krishnan. This was the guy—a moron, according to Manny Sky—whose passenger had drowned on the Rio Toro just a few weeks back. Lucy wanted to hear his version of events. When she walked into the building and ascended a steep ladder stair to his office in a loft in the upper level of the warehouse, she instantly recognized him: he was the last guy she’d seen, and spoken to, at the Blue Marlin hooker bar in San Jose, on her first night in town. He looked up at her, smiled in recognition, and said, “What’s a woman like you doing in a place like this?”
She laughed, and said, “Looking for adventure.”
“Then you’ve come to the right place,” he replied. “This,” he went on, waving over the railing at the warehouse below, with its stacked and racked river rafts, kayaks, mountain bikes, and heaps of outdoor action gear, “is adventure central.”
Krishnan McLemore—Indian mama, American import-export business dad—grew up surfing in Huntington Beach, California, came to CR for the waves, ended up sticking around for the jungles and the rivers. Eventually he hooked up with a Swedish girl he met on a whitewater run down the General, the gnarly Class Four river in the Southwest. Three years later they got divorced. In between the two of them started Desafio, which she bailed out of when they split up, although it was not much of a bail-out since she was now running a horse rental and riding camp on the edge of Fortuna, specializing in trips around the flank of the volcano from Fortuna up to the cloud forest of Monteverde. This made things a bit awkward since they saw eac
h other nearly every day. “But I can’t complain,” Krishnan said. “I love the country and my business, and Hedwig and I remain friends, even if her choice of boyfriends since we split up has been shall we say questionable?” They sat in his little loft office, crammed with two desks cluttered with several laptops and stacks of contracts, schedules, and brochures. Various employees, all young, cute and energetic, bustled in and out of the equipment room downstairs. Krishnan talked with an oddly appealing mix of a yo dude SoCal surfer accent and an East Indian, Urdu-inflected manner of precise English phrasing that compelled Lucy to straighten up and speak right. After twenty minutes of preliminaries and the establishment of a certain slightly flirty rapport—he was pushing forty and balding but tall and slender, with guileless East Indian eyes, an open face, and a triathlete’s build, all long, sinewy muscle—Lucy cleared her throat and said, “I’m sorry, Krish”—for that is what he was called, he said, by his friends, “but I have to ask: what about the incident—the drowning accident—”
“A terrible, terrible thing,” he said sadly, the light draining from his face, “and a story that seemingly everyone needs to hear.” He paused. “I still can’t believe it happened. I was—Dave Parmenter was my friend. We’d been on the Toro together three times before—maybe never so high, but that’s what’s supposed to make it exciting. You know, rising to the challenge. Desafio?” He crossed his arms wearily on his chest. “And I’ve got no excuses, really. The water was very big. He fell out of the boat, and hit his head on a rock—his helmet wasn’t fastened properly, it appears—and drowned. A high school math teacher. Left three kids and a wife. At least his family didn’t blame me, thank God.” His face darkened. “Though maybe they should have, since everyone in this country did.” He stopped, and looked at her, his eyes beseeching. “What did you—”
A strikingly pretty blonde woman burst into the office and said, “But what Krish did not tell you is that he spent an hour trying to talk Dave out of taking the trip because it was too dangerous, but that Dave would not be dissuaded.” She spoke with a Swedish accent. “Hi, I’m Hedwig,” she said. “And also that Krish leaped into a fucking torrent to try and rescue the man, and nearly drowned himself.”
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